We’re going to assume you have a Facebook business Page set-up already. If not, I’ll be putting together an article on doing that in the future for you. (Or you can contact us and we can assist you in getting one setup.)

Log in to your Facebook account and in the top right hand corner of the screen there is a down arrow. (see screenshot below. you can click the images to zoom in.)

Click this down arrow and it will show a drop down menu.

Notice the option Use Facebook as Page. If you have a single Facebook business Page, you will have the name of your page listed underneath this option. Clicking the name of your Page will make Facebook let you “act” as the Page, instead of you.

If you have more than one Facebook business page like me, clicking Use Facebook as Page will bring up a list of the Pages you manage.

Today I’m going to use the Village Roadshow Studios Page for the demonstration, so I am going to click the Switch button that is on the same line as Village Roadshow Studios. You will click Switch next to the Page you wish to work with.

Once you have Switched into the Page, you will notice that the top of your Facebook page will change. If you look at my first screenshot, it has my name in the top right hand corner. Now that I’ve switched, you can see that the name has changed to Village Roadshow Studios (below).

This means that whatever I do, will be tied to the Village Roadshow Studios Page account, not my account. This means that the Village Roadshow Studios page, can post, share photos, like other pages and people and this will not affect my personal account. Not that my personal account is that private, but my goal is to promote a business page, not me.

Today we want to promote our Page by visiting and liking other Pages that are relevant to our promotions, and inviting their fans to visit and like our page.

First thing to do is go to the search box at the top of the Facebook screen and type what you are looking for in the search box.

We’re going to search for Insane Technologies, then click the search button.

This will bring up a list of search results, exactly as it would if you were searching for a friend or a fan page under your normal Facebook account.

We could go ahead and click the LIKE button and this would add the Insane Technologies business fan Page to the list of Likes under the Village Roadshow Studios business Page.

Because we want to go to this page and promote to it’s fans, we’re going to click the blue Insane Technologies link. Again, this works just like it would if we were searching under our normal account.

This has now brought us to the Insane Technologies business fan page. Notice the LIKE button. This will only show for pages we have not yet LIKE’d. We’re going to go ahead and click the LIKE button.

Next we’re going to write on their wall. Something nice and friendly so that Page administrator’s don’t think we’re just spamming their page with advertising.

We don’t even need to put the URL for our page (www.facebook.com/VillageRoadshowStudios) because the post we share will have our name on it, and our name is currently Village Roadshow Studios. This means if anyone clicks our name, it will take them to our business fan page. ;)

You can see here the outcome of me posting on the Insane Technologies wall. I have put the red box around the post to highlight it.

To go back to your normal account, click the down arrow in the top right hand corner of your Facebook page and click the menu option Switch back to David (your name will be there).

Now if we take a look at my Facebook wall (which shows all the new posts from everyone I follow and like), we’ll see the Posts that Village Roadshow Studios just made.

Don’t forget, the best way to promote your Facebook business page is to include the web address in your email signature, newsletters and other marketing materials. Encourage your friends and current page fan’s to share the page and invite others. You can even run a promotion or competition to raise x number of fans and a random person will win a prize – make it worth their effort, but even a $200 iPod is a fantastic gift to one person in exchange for asking your “fans” to extend your exposure to 1,000 people!

Of course, keep your page interesting. Good, interesting content will encourage organic growth.

There you go!

Today I’m going to share how we write many of our procedures with a couple of tools you probably already have.

I thought this would be a great topic to kick start the year with as coming out of the Christmas period we are all systems go as we migrate to a new database (ConnectWise), train up our new PA, design improved work flows, and do all this on the fly, so to speak.

Over the years the team and I have tried all form of Wiki’s, Sharepoint and databases to find the best way to store our company and technical procedures, but nothing has worked as well as using plain old, every computer in your business should have it, Microsoft Word.

That’s right. Super advanced tech right there. And if you’re using Windows 7, you have the ultimate companion tool that will make passing on your knowledge to others a dream come true – enter the Snipping Tool.

Back in the day, you either needed another program to take screenshots, or do some fancy CTRL+PRINT SCREEN combinations, but with the Snipping Tool you can literally pick the exact part of the screen you want, then add a highlighter, circle a few things, and plop that image straight into your Word document.

So here’s a few quick tips to get you started.

1. Create a folder on your Company drive for Procedures.
2. Depending on your business, you may wish to divide this down in to a Company, Administration and Technical sub-folder.
3. Your Company sub-folder will have all your Company wide policies and procedures, like your Employee Handbook, Time Of Request Procedure, etc.
4. Your Administration sub-folder will have all the procedures your Administration team will operate from.
5. And your Technical (or alternative name) sub-folder will hold all the procedures that your day to day staff will use in their duties.

We went ahead and broke these folders down a bit more, so that it made it easier to find things and to know where to store them. This is up to you. The more organised the better, but if you start by adding 50 sub-folders straight away there’s an extremely high chance that someone is going to create a procedure for something that someone else has already written. And this is a huge waste of time.

Before I go on, it’s all well and good launching into the process of writing procedures, but you need to get your entire team on board with this policy. I’ve sat and drafted procedures with team members before (most of whom are no longer working for me) and then never seen the document they were meant to create.

You need to get buy in. You need everyone to see the value in doing this. The bottom line, yes it will take a little bit longer to do the first time, but if everyone documents what they know, and everyone else follows that documentation, everything you do, will be standardised, everyone will be more efficient, and there will be fewer headaches.

We all want less stress right?

A tip I took from Karl Palachuk, an amazing IT professional out of the States, is to run the procedure through your team and get each one of them to add to it and enhance it. I get the team to do this each time they use the document, so it’s an ongoing evolution.As Karl points out, some people might be happy with some pretty basic steps, whilst other people like to be very detailed.

I like to be very detailed. In fact, I like to spell out my background logic for why we’re doing something a certain way, so as to help the person following my procedures understand our goal better, and to hopefully avoid them getting stuck and needing to ask questions. I want my team to be super efficient, whilst being super awesome.

The next part of getting everyone on board, is to introduce a company policy that “if it hasn’t been documented before, and you’re working on it, document it now”. It takes a bit of reminding at first, but soon enough you should find everyone is getting with the program.

Now for the fun stuff.

The very next time you are doing something that has not been documented, before you get started, open Word and on the first line of the document write 4 to 6 words which describe what the goal of this procedure is. ie: “Adding Customers to QuickBooks”; “Handling New Customer Enquiries”; “Setting up a new Hosted Exchange acccount”.

Next, SAVE the document. Find the most appropriate location for it and save it. Use the HEADING as the file name.

One of the beautiful things of modern computing is the ability to search. You and your team simply need to click on the Procedures folder and search. Whether you search on a single keyword, or a number of keywords, it doesn’t matter. Windows Search will scan the file names and contents of those Word documents and tell you which ones contain what you’re looking for. How awesome is that?

All you need to do now is work through whatever it is you are doing, and spell out the steps the individual should take, if they were to mirror you.

If you have Windows 7, open the snipping tool (go to your Start menu and in the search box type ‘snip’) and start taking screenshots of each page you are referencing. Use the highlight and marker tool to point the reader to specific areas that need attention.

You can never be too detailed.

Divide your document into sub sections if necessary.

At the bottom of your document put a section for revision history. Something along the lines of

Original Author: David Rudduck 23/01/2012
Notes:
Outlined original draft. Stepped through procedure for migrating customer to hosted Exchange platform.

Encourage your team to update this section, if they update the document. For example.

Original Author: David Rudduck 21/01/2012
Notes:
Outlined original draft. Stepped through procedure for migrating customer to hosted Exchange platform.
Updated By: Matthew Harrison 23/01/2012
Notes:
Added screenshots to section on creating customer account. Highlighted the buttons that need to be clicked.

And so on and so forth.

Not exactly rocket science I know, but any any step forward is a positive motion. We all have to start somewhere!

Now if you want to take it a step further, by a flip camera and start recording staff doing specific work functions and narrate the video.

If your industry involves a lot of manual work, or special craft, imagine the time you could save teaching new employees a technique, if you had it already recorded and narrated for them to watch and learn from?

Another great tool is a screen recording tool. I use Screenpresso, but there are lots out there, even a few good free ones.

Screenpresso allows me to record my entire computer screen, or a section of it. This way I can record the steps as I work in a particular program, or setup a particular device, then turn it into a video for my team or clients to watch later.

So with 2012 ahead of you, you now have no excuse to not be documenting your business. Just think how much easier your job would be, if everyone did things exactly how you wanted, every time.

Here’s to a successful 2012!

Step #1 – Call your IT Consultant

The first thing I really must stress is that you call your IT consultant and let him or her know that you’re thinking of moving, before you sign the new lease, purchase or whatever.

Unless you are living in the dark ages, your office is heavily dependant on computers – and getting your IT Consultant in on the ground floor of this decision will greatly help with the planning, moving and long term benefits you can make out of this business decision.

Step #2 – Check the Internet capabilities

The last thing you want to hear from your IT Consultant is that the new office you’ve just committed yourself to for the next 3 years has terrible Internet and you’re going to struggle to get a decent service, let alone take advantage of cost saving technologies like VoIP (Internet Telephony) and other cloud services!

You can use www.adsl2exchanges.com.au and type in the address of your new location. Ideally you will want the new location to be ADSL2/2+ capable and support download speeds above 12mbps and upload speeds as close to 1mbps (1024kbps) as possible.

Step #3 – Design Your Office

We use Microsoft Visio to design maps of our customer’s offices for their site documentation. If you don’t have that, pencil and paper works pretty good too

Whilst you are working out where all your desks and staff will go, make sure you allocate a location for your server, phone system, and network switches. You do not want the ‘backbone’ of your business computer systems sitting in an open area where anyone can get to them.

Ideally you will want to designate a secure and lockable area that you can use to store all your network and communication equipment. The area should be relatively dust free and have room to install a small air conditioner in it – electronic equipment does not like heat!

Even if you don’t have a server, ensure there is room for one should your business needs grow in the future. Your phone system, ADSL modem, all your cabling and wiring is going to go in this location and if you can afford it, you should have everything installed in nice neat cabinets.

Also work out if you want wireless services for mobile phones and transient staff. As wonderful as wireless is, you should hard wire everything that you can. As wireless is not a consistent signal databases and applications like MYOB or QuickBooks may become corrupt if accessed over wireless. We even find that ‘wireless printers’ are generally less troublesome if they are hard wired.

Step #4 – Call Your IT Consultant

Hopefully you’ve kept your IT Consultant in the loop throughout this process. If not, give them a call and let them know where you are up to. Arrange a suitable time to visit the prospective premises with them and do a walk through with your office design.

Your IT Consultant should be able to offer some advice on your new office design and help you make that final decision that the new premises is right for you. Your IT Consultant may need to organise a suitable telephone and data communication specialist to install necessary equipment, relocate your existing phone system, or install a new VoIP phone system

At this point you can finally plan the timeline for your move, taking into account the lead time for fit-out, any cabling, telephone line installation, Internet service activation and your IT consultant.

Step #5 – Call Telstra

You need to find out whether you can transfer your existing lines to the new premises. Unless you are staying in the same general area, this is usually unlikely.

Up until a few years ago, Telstra used to quote a 3 to 4 week turnaround for the installation of new lines. This is much better now (approximately 1 week), but it is best to get this organised ahead of confirming your move date.

You will need at least one PSTN (Analogue) line for your FAX. This service will become your ADSL service. 

Step #6 – Call your Internet Provider

Once you have been issued the phone number for your new FAX service and the service has been activated at your new premises you can begin getting the Internet on-line.

Whilst you can transfer ADSL internet services from one premises to another, we often find that someone drops the ball and the whole process ends in tears. Generally we recommend you just have a new service installed at the new premises then terminate the old one once you have completed the move. This way you also have the ability to delay the move if there are delays in other areas of your plan.

Do NOT use Telstra Bigpond for your business service. This service is designed for residential usage and lacks the performance and service quality of a proper business grade service. We recommend OnTheNet (A Gold Coast based Internet provider), Internode and Telstra Business (not Bigpond!). The service will cost a little more, but it will be worth it in the long run.

Your IT Consultant will guide you on plans, but always make sure you get at least one static IP address.

Step #7 – Move!

Hopefully by this stage you have worked with your IT Consultant and your new premises has a secure room for your server, phone system and network switches; your IT Consultant has engaged a qualified electrician and data communication specialist to install or update the network cabling in the premises and install suitable data cabinet; your IT Consultant has organised for the relocation of your existing phone system or is installing a new VoIP capable phone system; you have at least one PSTN telephone service and your Internet service is installed and tested.

Now all you need to do is pack all your equipment, hire a moving company and move! Your IT Consultant will organise suitable technicians to assist in packing down and setting back up your computer systems, however as a general rule we don’t recommend they physically move the equipment for both insurance and workplace health and safety reasons.

All going well you should be able to move from one location to the other over a weekend. Your IT Consultant will take care of all the technical stuff in the background and ensure that a technician is on-site Monday morning to assist your staff with any teething issues.

Let me explain – A little while back when iTunes 10.4 came out my computer at home started running log a dog. Being the techie I am I looked at the running programs and found ‘AppleMobileDeviceService.exe’ was using above 50% of my computer’s processor.

I removed this program but this morning updated my work computer to the latest iTunes 10.5 and experienced the same problem.Rather that take the same approach, I did some research, found the solution and wrote a little script for our support team which they can now apply to our customers computers remotely to fix this issue.

How can I tell if this is the reason for my slow computer?

If you think your computer has been running slow recently and you want to if it’s the same problem, you can do the following to confirm you are experiencing the same issue.

1. Press the following keys at the same time CTRL+SHIFT+ESC(APE). This will bring up the Windows Task Manager.
2. Along the top of the Windows Task Manager you will notice a few tabs, click on the Processes tab. This page will list all the processes currently running on your computer (don’t panic!).
3. Click the column name CPU (click the word CPU). This will sort the list by CPU usage. You may need to click this twice to make it sort highest to lowest.
4. If you see AppleMobileDeviceService.exe (or part of the name, if the column width is too short) listed high in the list (under the column Image Name), your sluggish computer is a result of this iTunes bug.

How do I fix this iTunes problem?

If you’re in one of our Managed Service Programs, simply contact our helpdesk and ask them to fix it for you.

If you’re not in one of our Managed Service Programs, you can follow the following steps.

1. Go to your START menu (in Windows Vista and Windows 7 this is a Windows logo, usually in the bottom left of your screen)
2. In Windows XP, go to the RUN option and type ‘cmd‘ and hit enter.
3. In Windows Vista and Windows 7, type ‘cmd‘ in the Search window. You will see cmd.exe appear in your Start menu. Right click this and select Run as Administrator.
4. A black window will appear. In it, type ‘netsh winsock reset‘ and hit enter.
5. Reboot your computer.

1. Server Warranty
• Question: Is your server covered by a manufacturers warranty (or 3rd party post manufacturers warranty) which includes the replacement of parts, with on-site labour provided by the manufacturer, and a response to any support request in 4 hours or less?
• Reason: If your server is out of warranty, or the warranty doesn’t include on-site parts & labour, or there is no guaranteed response time, you may be sitting on a cost time bomb just waiting to happen.
2. Server Monitoring
• Question: Is someone constantly observing the health of your server, looking for possible hardware faults like failing hard drive devices?; ensuring that the server resources are not being stretched and causing network slow downs due to lack of memory, processing power or storage?; looking for errors in the system log files which may indicate problematic software or even hackers trying to get into your systems from the internet?
• Reason: Unless someone is keeping a watchful eye on your server, you really have no way of knowing how well it is performing, when it is slowing your business down, or when it needs some TLC.
3. Data Backup
• Question: If you came into your office today and found it had been broken in to, do you have an offsite backup of all the data you absolutely could not continue your business without, from yesterday (or at least the day before)?
• Reason: Most people backup but not everyone performs a daily backup on to a different / rotated piece of media (tape, external hard drive, cloud backup solution, etc) which they store off site. If your office was robbed, burnt to the ground, flooded or suffered any other catastrophe, are you confident that you have an up to date copy of all your data stored off-site that you could confidently use to get your business back up and running quickly?
4. Backup Test
• Question: Do you or your current IT provider perform a monthly backup test, restoring a random set of files or folders from a randomly selected backup set, and ensuring that the restored data is not corrupt?
• Reason: Just because your daily backup ran and told you it was successful doesn’t mean it is. Unless you are testing your backups regularly you have absolutely no way of knowing whether you will be able to rely on that backup in the event of an emergency.
5. Disaster Recovery Strategy
• Question: Do you have a disaster recovery solution in place which takes a full backup (snapshot) of your server (not just your data) and will allow you to restore the server to the same hardware, or other hardware, and have the system running again in less than one day?
• Reason: Even though your backup software may be configured to backup your entire server to tape or external hard drive, the process of actually restoring your server from that backup is often more complicated than you realise. A proper disaster recovery solution will allow you to take a ‘snapshot’ of your server and restore it to the same system, or even another server or virtual machine, in a few hours, and be a painless and smooth process.
6. Battery Backup / Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)
• Question: Is your server, network equipment (network switches, modems, routers, firewalls) and backup devices (external hard drives, tape devices, etc) connected to a UPS (battery backup) device which can provide these systems with at least 10 minutes ‘run time’ in the event of a power outage and is your server configured to gracefully shut down if power does not resume after this time?
• Reason: Unless your server and your backup devices are connected to a UPS you risk data corruption in the event of a power outage. Additionally we find that devices like switches and modems can cause network connectivity problems if they are not connected to a UPS to help filter and regulate the power. Further, if the UPS is not connected to your server via USB and the UPS software is not configured to gracefully shut down your server, your data could be corrupt by an ‘unclean’ shutdown.
7. Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) Test
• Question: How old is your UPS? Have you replaced the batteries in the last 18 months? Have you performed a UPS battery test in the last 6 months?
• Reason: The batteries in your UPS are no different to the batteries in your television remote or wireless mouse. Over time they degrade. If your UPS is not regularly tested you have no way of knowing whether the batteries work.
8. Anti Virus
• Question: Is the anti virus product your company uses listed on the latest AV Comparatives report with an ‘Advanced’ rating or higher?  Is it installed on every server, laptop and desktop computer? Is the version installed the latest version and are the virus definitions up to date (should be no more than 1-2 days old)?
• Reason: There’s a lot of anti virus products out there and many people base their selection on their experience with the product versus those of others, but we can all have bad experiences with a good product and vice versa. If your anti virus software isn’t being independently tested by a trusted advisory, or it’s not scoring well in these tests, is your business really safe from viruses and malware?
9. Internet Security
• Question: Does your business have a proper firewall (not just a modem or router that has a ‘firewall’) which scans all internet traffic, both inbound and outbound, for viruses, malware and known threats?
• Reason: Most ADSL modems and routers have a built in firewall, however they are relatively ‘simple’ and do nothing more than blocking traffic from the Internet based on a set of “allow” rules. A proper firewall with deep packet inspection can scan all internet traffic for threats and remove them before they even reach your computers, adding an extra layer of protection to your computers.
10. Site Documentation
• Question: Do you or your IT provider keep up to date site documentation on all your computer systems, which is stored at your business so it can be accessed by either yourself or a computer technician quickly in the event of an emergency? Does the documentation include a full list of all your computer hardware, their configuration, warranties, software and software licenses? Does the documentation include step by step instructions for your backup and disaster recovery strategies that you or one of your staff can understand and follow in the event of an emergency, without needing a geek-to-english translator?
• Reason: If all the knowledge of your computer systems is stored in the head of one person, or even if the information is documented, but only your IT provider has direct access to it, what will happen to your business in an emergency? What happens if that provider goes out of business? Your site documentation should be kept up to date and cover everything that you may need to help explain your IT systems to anyone else, or to get your business up and running fast after a catastrophe.

How did you go? Did you answer YES to every test?

If you struggled to answer any of the questions in this test, chances are your site documentation is either non-existent or insufficiently detailed.

If you could answer these questions, however weren’t able to answer YES confidently to all of them, your current IT provider may be making money out of  you by ‘fixing problems’ rather than recommending and implementing solutions and strategies which will significantly reduce the risk of computer problems.

Get Peace Of Mind With Our 47-Point Problem Prevention Network Assessment

This 10 point risk assessment is a small part of our 47-Point Problem Prevention Network Audit.

Our FREE network assessment will

• Diagnose any ongoing problems or concerns you are currently experiencing with your network.
• Verify the integrity of your data backups. (Note: Tape backups fail at the rate of 78% of the time; don’t wait for a crisis to hit before you discover yours weren’t working!)
• Look for hidden viruses, spyware, and loopholes in your network security that could allow hackers and viruses to compromise your network and confidential information.
• Review your server logs to uncover developing problems and conflicts that will turn into unexpected downtime.
• Answer your questions about upgrades, adding new equipment, remote access, or any other project you have in mind.

Simply fill in the form below and we will arrange to perform our 47-point assessment on your computer systems and help you identify any other potential issues before they cost you money!

You could be turning to the person in the cubicle next to you, or reaching for your mobile phone to call the person who you think can answer your question, but have you ever stopped to consider whether your question needs an immediate answer?

This topic was brought up last week in a number of discussions I had with businesses and even a few conversations I had with friends. In fact, I even had a 45 minute conversation with one person regarding their feeling that mobile phones have significantly increased our need for instantaneous responses!

We are all guilty of doing it. Whatever it is that causes the trigger, we get to a point where we have a question that we need an answer to and without thinking, we turn to the closest person to us or dial someone’s mobile number to obtain that answer.

Our office is ‘open plan’, which is great for collaboration, but is unfortunately very bad for interruptions. A few months ago I prepared a quick list of questions for our team to keep on their desks and ask themselves first, before they turn to the person next to them and ask a question.

After hearing this familiar frustration last week, I thought I’d share this list with you. It’s based on other research and information I found and then applied to our business, so you may need to alter it slightly for your own.

Before you turn to someone and ask them a question, ask yourself the following:

• Have you asked this question before? If so, are you just being lazy by asking someone else for the answer, rather than trying to remember the answer yourself?
• Has the answer you seek been written down somewhere? Have you checked the company knowledge base, employee manual, procedures or your own notes for the answer?
• Is the person you’re asking really the right person to be asking? Quite often we’ll ask someone we trust, however that doesn’t necessarily mean they are the best person to be answering your questions.
• Is it urgent that your question is answered straight away? Unless there is an emergency and something is likely to go very wrong unless you get an immediate answer to your question, chances are it won’t affect you or the outcome if you don’t get an immediate answer.
• If possible, try bundling your questions together. Keep a list of questions you have that pop up throughout the day and put them together in an email for your supervisor, colleague, customer, vendor, etc. Every time you stop to ask someone a question, you are impacting both your own and their productivity. Bundle your questions together and you will improve your own productivity as well as theirs!
• If it’s absolutely essential you get an answer straight away, because if you don’t the customer will get irate, something will go terribly wrong, or <insert critical emergency here>, then and only then, turn to the person (or call the person), kindly ask if you can interrupt them, let them know it’s urgent and then ask your question. Make sure you write down the answer in case you need it again!

Author’s note: These articles are written by David Rudduck, Managing Director of Insane Technologies, and are based on research he and his team have done, combined with outcomes and lessons learnt through their own experience facing common business challenges.

As anyone who has owned a business, managed a business or even managed a team of people will understand, there are new challenges to overcome every day. David and his team share these articles in the hope that it may help other business owners and managers find answers to their own business challenges.

We appreciate that what we publish here is not ‘fact’ and that due consideration should be made before applying these to your own business.

Check it out if you’d like a good laugh.

In an era where personal identify theft is RIFE, is it time these institutions reconsidered the way they approach personal identification verification?

I understand WHY they do it. If the ATO representative called from a number which was clearly identifiable as the ATO, many people would not answer it. No one really likes hearing from the ATO. And whether it’s a by-product of their job, or the selection criteria for hiring, the people who call you generally sound grumpy and seem to exhibit no sign of emotion.

When was the last time they called you to say “Hi Mr Rudduck, we just received your tax return and want to let you know that you’ve made a mistake, but we picked up on it. We’ve determined we owe YOU $5,000. Now you have a sensational day Sir.” ???

Now let me explain WHY I have an issue with the way in which these institutions contact us.

Back when I was in high school, I associated myself with a number of groups who shared information on practices that were not entirely legal. I won’t deny it, I was 16 and being able to make free phone calls and what not was cool for a young computer nerd. I got into trouble as a by-product, but thankfully one teacher in particular showed interest in me and encouraged me to use my talents in a more positive light. I still live by his most repeated mantra, “Prior Preparation and Planning Prevents a Piss Poor Performance“, but that’s another story all together.

Anyway, one of the most basic methods that I remember reading about being used to obtain credit card details was to simply call the prospect and pretend to be their bank, explaining that due to a computer malfunction some of their records had been lost. They would then proceed to ask them a bunch of personal questions and the unsuspecting prospect, wanting nothing more than to help the bank, would go ahead and give them their details.

This was back in the early 1990′s and the practice probably pre-dates that. You would think that we have moved beyond that, but I’d like to point out evidence as to why this is not so.

PHISHING, (pronounced fishing) is the process of sending a prospect a carefully crafted email which is designed to look like their bank, PayPal, eBay, Internet provider, or other institute that has the potential to provide the identity thief with account username and passwords and or personal information which could be used to forge paperwork so that the thief can obtain credit cards or finance in the suspects name.

We see it every day. In fact sadly one of our wonderful customers recently fell victim for one of these scams. They can be very convincing! I received an email the other day purporting to be from my own bank and realising it was a phishing scam I clicked on the link and was surprised to see how accurately it looked like my banks internet banking site. Looking at the web page source, I could clearly see where it was pushing the details into some scammers database.

We use a WELL KNOWN FUEL CARD PROVIDER (who I won’t name) to provide our team with a fuel allowance and I was very disappointed to receive an email from them asking me to click a link in the email to view my online statement. What idiot wrote that email? What thought went into the process of future proofing their customers details? They have set a precedence and now their customers will EXPECT emails to come from them with a link to their website. HELLO POTENTIAL SCAMMER RISK.

My mother, who is probably the most careful person in the world when it comes to her personal details, reviewing her bank statements, etc, recently had her credit card COPIED. She went to the shops, paid for her goods on her credit card and about 30 minutes later she got a call from the shop saying her credit card was at the front desk. She doesn’t even remember not getting it back. The following day she received a phone call from the bank asking her to confirm whether she’d made certain purchases in SYDNEY (we live on the Gold Coast).

It seems that somewhere between paying for her goods and leaving the store, someone had managed to swipe her card, copy the details from the magnetic strip and then produce a duplicate of her card in another City, a thousand kilometres away and then proceeded to run up a few thousand dollar bill, all in less than 24 hours. I remember when I worked at Woolworths, we were actually FORBIDDEN to touch the customers card, yet shop assistants do it EVERY DAY. I also remember one checkout attendant getting arrested for MEMORIZING a customers credit card details then going on a shopping spree in the same centre we worked at!

Even more ironically, I was talking to my girlfriend the evening when Mum had found out her credit card had been duplicated. Kath’s been working in Wellington, New Zealand on Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” so I’ve been receiving her mail, scanning it and emailing it to her. I had just been telling her Mum’s story and she then related a similar story about a number of people she worked on in a previous production being the victim of tax return fraud.

“Speaking of which”, I said. “I’ve got a letter here from your accountant. It’s your tax return. Apparently you’ve received a $x return this year.” At which point she exclaimed a number of profanities as she told me that the accountant on the letter was not hers, and we both realised that she too had been a victim of the same fraud. They suspect one of the crew members who was obviously privy to each individuals Tax File Number, must have been involved in tax return fraud.

So, back to the original focus of this RANT. With scammer’s looking for any way to get a hold of information that can provide them with a means to steal money, is it really acceptable that institutions like the ATO, banks and a number of other organisations, contact YOU from an UNLISTED number then ask YOU to verify YOUR identity?

I have in the past, when receiving a call from a blocked number on my mobile (which seems to be the standard practice), flatly denied to provide the caller with any details and asked them to provide me with the department they work in and their extension, so that I can call the institution back on it’s publicly listed numbers and be transferred to them to proceed with the call.

This doesn’t always work as a number of the outbound calls people are not directly linked to any of the departments who receive inbound calls. And likewise, do you really want to be telling the ATO “I’m sorry, unless I can verify you are who you say you are, I am not going to speak with you” – as I said before, I’ve very rarely spoken to a representative of the ATO who was cheery and showed any sign of empathy. The last thing I want that person to do is to put a red cross against my name and make my life difficult should I ever do something and need to ask for some form of leniency.

What’s your thoughts on the matter? Does this frustrate you too? Have you been the victim of identity fraud?

At Insane Technologies we take computer security very seriously. For a FREE Computer Security Risk Assessment, fill in the form below, or contact us on (07) 5539 6116.

“The average desk worker loses 2.1 hours a day to interruptions and distractions, one study shows. And it can take several minutes to get back to work afterward.”

“If each interruption took 10 minutes, you’d spend 50% of your time on them. If you can’t work for more than 10 minutes without being interrupted, a small project might end up taking all day.”

It is truly an awesome world we live in where we can contact someone on the other side of the planet and get a response within 1 day. We are connected with email, instant messaging, Skype video calls, SMS, facebook, twitter, foursquare and the list goes on..

Is this having a negative effect on our lives?

What you may not realise is that every time you hear a ‘notification sound’ (new email alert from Outlook, SMS sound from your phone, etc) your brain stops focussing on what it was focussing on. We want to know what that message says and just like Pavlov‘s dog, we have trained ourselves to react to the sounds that these ‘instant communication’ mediums make!

If you’re like most people, that simple moment of switching focus from what you were doing to reading that new email or SMS is enough to set you 5 or 10 minutes back with what you WERE doing.

Are you feeling a little overwhelmed with your workload? Can you admit to reacting to these notification sounds? Do you check your email inbox a few times each hour? If so, we’ve put together a few quick things you can do to help you keep your focus and limit unnecessary interruptions.

• Emails
1. Turn off the new email notification popup and sound in Outlook.
2. Minimize Outlook and work on checking your emails every 2 hours.
• Instant Messaging
1. Turn off the new message notification popup in MSN, iChat, Skype, Trillian, etc
2. Turn off the new message notification sound in MSN, iChat, Skype, Trillian, etc
• Personal Mobile Phones
1. Turn personal mobile phones on silent when you are at work and make sure they are out of sight. Even if you see your mobile flash, or hear it vibrate, you will still get distracted.
2. Advise your family to call you at your place of work if it’s an emergency.
• Quiet Time
1. If you are busy, put your phones on silent or DND (Do Not Disturb) and let your the receptionist know.
2. If necessary, find a way to signal your quiet time. Put up a sign on your door or your cubicle and let others know that if they see that sign (or object) that you are “in the zone” and should only be disturbed if it’s an absolute emergency.
• Keep the common areas of your office free of distractions
1. If you need to have a conversation with someone about a work related issue, organise a suitable block of time to discuss the issue with them and go to a meeting room. Resist the urge to break their concentration until a time you are both ready to talk.
2. If you are interrupted, don’t be afraid to tell the person that you are busy, but can you get back to them? If you must talk, take them AWAY from everyone else (if possible) and talk.
• Learn to say NO to distractions
1. If someone calls you, emails you, instant messages you, walks up to you and asks you a question, or yells across the room to you – resist the urge to answer them straight away. It’s ok to say “Can I answer you later?” – I doubt they’ll say no.
2. If someone around you is talking about something, resist the urge to join in the conversation.
3. If you need to, wear headphones to avoid getting caught wanting to participate in a conversation.

Cloud based email services (Google Apps for Business, Hosted Exchange and Office 365) are a hot topic with our customers at the moment so we thought we’d give you a run down on what these services can offer your business and how they compare with each other.

If your company has a server in it’s (or one of it’s) offices, chances are you’re probably using Microsoft Exchange as your email solution. Exchange is the glue that makes our emails, contacts and address book synchronise between Outlook and our mobile phones.

If you aren’t using Exchange, then you’re probably using a POP/IMAP Mailbox system that’s provided with your company’s website hosting. If this is the case, emails don’t share easily between Outlook and your mobile phone, and you can forget about calendar and address book synchronisation.

This ‘Mailbox’ based email system is old and clunky and really doesn’t meet the demands of the modern business but many businesses use it because they cannot justify the cost of buying a server to get the benefits of Microsoft Exchange.

The introduction of Google Apps for Business was a game changer for business email. Suddenly businesses of any size had access to the core features of Microsoft Exchange, without needing to spend big money on servers.

In competition, many hosting providers have introduced a ‘Hosted’ version of Exchange and most recently Microsoft has launched a direct competitor to Google Apps for Business called Office 365.

With so many options available, how do you choose the right one for your business?

Well I’m glad you asked. We’ve put together a quick comparison chart for you so you can look at what each system offers and make the choice as to which solution meets your business needs and budget.

NOTE: In most cases these services are offered as monthly, per mailbox costs. We’ve converted them into yearly costs to make it easier to compare.

Now to explain all those asterisks (*). Please note, this list appears in order that I’ve marked with an asterisk is the table above.

• I’ve only listed the 5GB hosted Exchange plan. Depending on the provider these can go from 500mb all the way through to 20GB, however the pricing is very expensive.
• Office 365 is currently only available through Telstra. $95 per year is the cost if you have 25 or fewer users. Once you have over 25 users, you jump to $302 per mailbox per year for essentially the same service!
• Outlook will work with Google Apps but to get full functionality you need to install Google Apps Sync which is free if you are a Google Apps for Business user.
• Office 365 is a web service. There has been a rumour in the media that the basic subscription does not allow you to connect your existing Microsoft Outlook to Office 365 and to gain this functionality you need to purchase a more advanced version. Telstra’s website says nothing about this, so I can neither confirm nor deny this fact (at this time).
• Google Apps, like Office 365, is a web based solution. Whilst you can get synchronisation with Outlook using Google Apps Sync, you can’t share calendars, address books and mailboxes via Outlook. You must do it in the Google Apps website. Incidentally this is the same for turning on and off ‘Out of office replies’.
• I say that “POP/IMAP Mailbox’s” can sync with iPhone’s and Blackberry’s. This is partially true. They don’t sync. There are ways to make emails appear on your computer and your mobile phone, but its klunky and problematic.
• To get BlackBerry’s to sync with anything you need add-on software. This is one of the reasons we generally recommend our customers do not use BlackBerry’s. In the case of an in-house Exchange server, you need Blackberry Enterprise Server (or BES Express). In the case of hosted Exchange, providers generally charge extra for this service (generally $15 per device). In the case of Google Apps for Business you need to install a Blackberry application supplied by Google. Telstra rather disappointingly state that BlackBerry users can “add calendar and contacts to their BlackBerry device through a wired sync with Outlook on the PC”. This means Office 365 and your BlackBerry device will not automatically synchronise contacts and calendars unless you physically plug the Blackberry into your computer.
• Google Apps for Business and Office 365 both include web based word processors and spreadsheet applications and both offer the ability to store and share these documents online – Google Docs and Sharepoint. Both Office 365 and Hosted Exchange service offerings bundle Sharepoint with 25mb of storage, with additional storage available for a cost.

So which option is best for your business?

Firstly I must say that Office 365 has only recently entered the Australian market, so we are yet to fully experience the platform, the migration path and the user experience. I never recommend that a customer becomes an ‘early adopter’ of any new software or technology – their businesses just can’t afford to be guinea pigs.

That being said, many of our customers who have previously had in-house Microsoft Exchange servers are very interested in hosted Exchange. Inversely, customers who have been using a POP3/IMAP Mailbox services are extremely happy with the additional features that Google Apps for Business offers them, combined with the reduced cost.

The number one reason that some of our customers do not want to go to Google Apps for Business is often tied to what they could do with their in-house Exchange server and their familiarity with how to do it in Microsoft Outlook. Google Apps Sync does a great job of linking to Microsoft Outlook, but there are some things it cannot do. The truth is if you want to use Google Apps for Business and use it properly, you are best to ditch Outlook and use the Google Apps web interface.

There are a number of things you can’t do in Outlook with Google Apps for Business, however that level of detail is beyond the scope of this article. If you’d like to read the full chart there is a link to the PDF at the bottom of this article.

Good reasons to jump to the cloud?

• You don’t currently have an in-house Exchange server.
• You are looking to purchase a new server and don’t want to spend money purchasing Exchange licenses.
• You don’t want the added overhead of managing an in-house Exchange server.
• You have staff working outside your office and want to reduce email outages caused by your office internet connection going down or problems with your server.

Things you need to be aware of before jumping to the cloud?

• If your office internet connection goes down, you will not be able to send emails to other people in your office.
• You may need to pay an additional fee for virus and spam filtering.
• Some services will offer mail archiving, which allows you to archive your emails onto the cloud for later retrieval from any device, rather than just your desktop. The added advantage of this service for some businesses is with compliance – you can archive staff emails so that should they leave and you need access to their emails for litigation purposes, you have an archived copy of all their emails.
• Before you migrate to the cloud, archive your email mailbox down to 500mb or less. When you migrate to a cloud provider you must upload your entire mailbox to them. If you have 10 or more staff with an average mailbox size of 2gb it will take a very long time to upload and this will affect the migration turnaround. Archive old mail locally. Try to take as little as possible.
• Whilst most cloud based email services are backed up by the provider in case of a major catastrophe, most will not allow you to restore an individual mailbox. If you accidentally delete an account, it’s gone. Some providers will offer this, but most don’t.

Here are a few other things to consider before you make your choice:

• Can your plans to move to the cloud also help your business save money by not needing to purchase Microsoft Office?
• Google Apps for Business includes Google Docs, which is a web based word processor, spreadsheet and presentation suite. Certain versions of Office 365 include web based versions of Microsoft Office.
• Certain versions of Office 365 can also be licensed to provide you with a license for the desktop version of Office, meaning you can standardise your Office software and pay on a per month basis.
• For many businesses, Google Docs provide all the features they need, however if you use software which in some way interfaces with Word, Excel or Outlook to perform mail merges, data lookups or generate reports – you may be locked into the desktop version of Office until those applications change (or you find alternatives).
• Both Google Apps and Sharepoint (usually included in a hosted Exchange and Office 365 service) can be used to provide your business with an external ‘intranet’ (aka ‘extranet’)  web site which you can use to securely share documents, templates and information with staff operating outside the office – rather than needing to provide them with VPN or Terminal Server/Remote Desktop services. This is a particularly big selling point for many of our customers who have multiple offices or remote staff and is something you can take advantage of very easy.

Interested in cloud based email and collaboration services?

We have migrated a number of customers to Google Apps for Business as well as hosted Exchange services, with company sizes ranging from 5 staff to over 100 and would love to help you.

We can also assist you in setting up a Sharepoint website so that you can share documents, information, templates and more with your team – both inside the office, and externally.

To organise a free consultation to assess your business needs, please contact our office on (07) 5539 6116 or shoot us a quick email to solutions@insane.net.au.

Reference material

• Google Apps for Business – http://www.google.com/a
• Google Apps Sync - https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gappssync
• Google Apps for BlackBerry - http://www.google.com/mobile/blackberry/
• Google Docs – http://docs.google.com
• Microsoft Office 365 – http://www.office365.com
• Microsoft Sharepoint – http://sharepoint.microsoft.com
• Microsoft Sharepoint in Plain English (YouTube) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s12Jb5Z2xaE
• Telstra Office 365 solution selector - http://www.telstrabusiness.com/business/portal/online/site/productsservices2/selectortool.502001
• Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook comparison chart- http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//support/enterprise/static/gapps/art/users/en/glook/google_apps_sync_chart.pdfof

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