Need Remote Access to your Computer?

The big snow storm is coming. It probably won’t be safe to drive to the office on Wednesday.

Contact your technician today to setup or test your remote access to your computer.

The weather outside is frightful

Property damage is from winter storms one thing. As you can see it’s easy to tabulate and throw into a graphic. But business productivity is another. It’s a larger number but because we don’t report to our insurance companies it doesn’t get measured.

Business productivity doesn’t get the glamor shot in news articles. Unless it’s the government, or how many flights airlines had to cancel.

Office of Personnel Management chief John Berry has said each snow day costs taxpayers $100 million in lost productivity from federal workers.

So if a snow day costs the Federal government $100 Million, how much does it cost you? If someone can’t make it into the office because there’s snow on the road how much did that cost your business? If you decide to send everyone home early so they can avoid a rush hour of slipping and sliding and hopefully live another to work another day, how much does that cost you?

I know it costs a lot. We can help to mitigate those costs by implementing some things that you probably already own.

 Now might be a good time to review how your staff can access company resources to work from home.

Free or nearly free options:

• Outlook Anywhere, if they have a laptop or smartphone
• Outlook Web Access, if they don’t have a laptop
• Sharepoint can be accessed from the web for some or all
• Remote access to their computer in the office
• Remote access to shared files and folders, if you have SBS 2011

Additional options:

• Dedicated remote computers. A small bank a computers specifically for remote access.
• Remote Services: to provide whole desktop experience
• Remote Services: to provide access to a specific application

Poor Choices:

• VPN – provides remote access but potential for infection is very high
• LogMeIn or GoToMyPC: Why bother when remote access is free and built into the operating system of your computer and provides better security

We can help you implement these solutions or train you on how to use them. We can also secure them. The trade-off in allowing remote access to be certain that we’ve secured it properly. Once secure your employees can work from home and be as functional as in the office.

__________

Connect with us! www.facebook.com/harborcomputerservices

Our Favorite Mobile Things

Mobility is really taking off. Everyone is getting smartphones, netbooks, laptops and handheld devices. For those of you looking to make them better, or still shopping I thought it might be helpful to tell you about our favorite things. This list is gleaned from our own usage of these products.

 

We love the iPhone and all of our technicians have one.

Pain Points? Spell Check and iTunes. Battery life is not outstanding.

Handy Free Apps? Maps, Weather, Yellow Pages, Bing, Sodoku, Yelp,  MoShare (sharepoint) and of course Angry Birds.

 

 

 

 

We have two Windows Phones. They are pretty new but we love these too. Battery life is better than we experienced with the iPhone. Having Word, Excel, OneNote. PowerPoint and Sharepoint built-in is wonderful for the business person on the go.

Pain Points? Too many clicks to turn off the ringer. No favorites list for quick phone dialing.

Handy Free Apps? Maps, Weather, Yelp, Bing, YouTube, and RunSat

 

 

This is the Jabra Cruiser. It’s a hands free speaker phone device for your car. Its amazing. Cuts out road noise so well that the person you’re calling won’t even know you are in the car. It has an FM transmitter built in so you will hear the caller from your cars speakers. Simple to use, it automatically connects to your phone via bluetooth when ever you’re in range and it has a 3 day battery life.

Bonus? It uses the same power cord as the Windows Phone.

 

 

The Intel NOBI. It’s a rugged notebook and tablet all in one. Powerful enough to run all of your apps in a 10” lightweight package. Rugged to a 3ft drop, waterproof and it has an anti-microbial coating. It also has built-in encryption so no one can ever read your data even if it gets stolen or they remove the hard drive. It’s the ultimate road warrior machine.

Bonus? This might sound hard to believe, but it’s a people magnate. Walk into any meeting, any conference, any coffeeshop, any Panera and you WILL be approached by more than one person asking about this notebook. Its everyone's dream device.

 

Our least favorite mobile things? BlackBerry and Droid phones. They continue to result in high support costs due to lost connectivity and constant resetting. Droid has the additional problem of continue unpatched security issues.

Small Business Server 2011

The new version of Small Business Server is here. It contains an interesting new feature, some new options and for those of you that purchased SBS via subscription there’s an extra benefit coming your way when you upgrade.

New Versions:

Exchange 2010, OWA 2010, Windows 2008 R2, and Sharepoint 2010 Foundation

New Features:

• Remote Web Access – this replaces Remote Web Workplace and provides the additional SCARY option of providing remote access to files and folder directly from the site.
• Sharepoint – Redesigned site, workflows (documents can pass from person to person automatically for approval or editing), blogs, additional security and content controls.
• Outlook Web Access – It’s almost indistinguishable from full Outlook. Many additional features added to make it more like Outlook.
• Administrator tools – much has changed behind the scenes for your administrator

Exciting New Option:

Exchange 2010 Enterprise Cals – these can be added to unlock more Exchange features including archiving, legal hold and search across mailboxes capability.

Extra Benefit for subscribers:

Subscribers to SBS Premium will receive what Microsoft calls
“make-good” whereas before SBS Premium was a single server, in 2011 it is two servers. Because of this change Microsoft is providing a free copy of the second server operating system. Software Assurance continues to prove to be a good value.

Over all we’re very impressed with Small Business 2011. It is addressing the needs of a more mobile work place beautifully and continues to provide features and functions that no other server package in the market does.

Quick Notes:

Many of our clients are moving data over to Sharepoint, a feature of small business server. If you haven’t considered doing this yet, please ask your technician about sharepoint. They can show you our sharepoint site and discuss how other clients of ours are using it. Many are finding it a great solution to make data easy to find, easy to track and available through a wide variety of devices.

Amy has been appointed to the Small Business Specialist Community Advisory Board at Microsoft. She will represent the Heartland region of Microsoft partners. The Heartland region includes Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.

Please connect with us on Facebook and Twitter! We’re active on both. www.facebook.com/harborcomputerservices  and www.twitter.com/harborcomputer

We hired a new technician

Please join us in welcoming Ethan Pitts to Harbor Computer Services.

Ethan brings to Harbor, 17 years of experience supporting computer networks for Xerox and CornerStone Schools. In both positions he not only supported the servers but also the pc’s, laptops and the people using them. This well-rounded experience makes him well suited to the type of work that we do for you. He is currently pursuing his bachelors degree and has been a member of the local Small Business Server user group for quite some time. He is also a drummer with a passion for making music.

For the next couple of months Ethan will be working closely with each of us on different days. It’s likely that you’ll see Ethan next time we need to make an on-site visit. You’ll be talking to him too as we ask him to take some calls for remote support under supervision.

We’re exciting to expand our staff and to bring on someone that we think will fit in very well and uphold the standards that we are known for.  

A happy MVP for another year

Microsoft has chosen to again award Amy with it’s Most Valuable Professional award. This award is given annually to a very select group of IT professionals that exhibit advanced technical skill and the generosity to share those skills with their peers. They award about 1700 people worldwide annually. Amy was awarded this year for Small Business Server. There are 40 people awarded for SBS around the world.

This award provides Harbor Computer Services opportunities and open doors at Microsoft, allowing us to represent the IT Community and our clients to Microsoft staff working on small business products. It’s an award but also an opportunity and responsibility that we take very seriously.