MJ's Business IT Blog

7 Lessons Entrepreneurs Can Learn from the Navy SEAL's

I have long been in awe of the Navy SEAL's and our military in general.  While never having had the privelage of serving myself, I find myself even more intriqued by our nations defenders now that one of my nephews has enlisted in the Navy.  He's not a SEAL, at least not that I know of, but I'm certainly more sensitized to anything related to the Navy, so when I saw this headline, I immediately read the article and it's a great read.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Make Sure You Have Backup For Your Cloud Strategy

There is no question that the Cloud holds a lot of promise, but it also has its risks.  Just this week, Intuit, the maker of the very popular QuickBooks accounting software, suffered a very serious, multi-day cloud outage.

What does this mean?  Their web sites were down at www.intuit.com and www.quickbooks.com.  More importantly, over the past several years, Intuit has quietly baked in a lot of cloud dependant services into their software.  If you use Intuit Payroll Services inside QuickBooks, this is a cloud service that depends on Intuits data centers.  During this outage, you were not able to process payroll.

E-mailing invoices and purchase orders from within QuickBooks also relies in part, on Intuit's cloud and you may not have been able to send those documents.  If you accept credit card payments through QuickBooks, you may not have been able to get credit card approvals or receive the deposits associated with them.

In the latest version, QuickBooks 2010, Intuit has also added highly integrated document management, to scan and attach accounting documents like packing lists and bills, to the QuickBooks transactions they are associated with.  You could not access these files during the outage.

If you use Intuit's hosted version of QuickBooks, you could not use your accounting software at all during this outage.  Was this the end of the world?  No.  What is inconvenient and an interruption to your business?  It may have been.  Could you have worked around the outage?  You should have been able to, provided you had considered these possibilities and had backup plans and processes in place.

In this specific example of a cloud outage, you should have been able to continue to work using manual processes, whether that was writing checks, processing payroll manually and keeping track of the days receipts by hand.  However, if you had not considered these possibilities, it was likely an extremely frustrating couple of days.

The point is that the cloud is not infalible.  There will be outages and you need to have plans in place to deal with them.  While the Internet has become extremely reliable, don't kid yourself, there will be outages.  Whether it's your ISP or your cloud service provider, outages will happen and you need to have backup plans in place to keep your business running effectively during these periods.  Embrace the cloud, but do your homework and be sure you have considered the risks and taken reasonable steps to mitigate them.

It's Not just the Droid Incredible...

Apple is reporting that AT&T and Apple itself, have run out of their launch day supplies of the new iPhone 4.   AT&T has reportedly stopped taking orders because demand has been so high and they need to regroup and clearly communicate when the device will be available again.  Demand for these smartphones is simply crazy!

Follow up to the Droid Incredible Review

I just saw an alert come by that Verizon Wireless is now telling customers that orders placed for the Droid Incredible may not be delivered for a month.  You can see the ship date that shows online on the Verizon Wireless site in this picture of the phone.

Seems demand for this popular high end smartphone is much greater than either the carrier or the manufacturer, HTC, anticipated.  Yikes. 

If you seriously want one of these, and you should, you better get your order in fast if you want to see it anytime this summer.  Good luck!

The Incredible Droid Incredible

I've recently been reviewing several new Android based smartphones for Verizon Wireless.  The most recent smartphone I have reviewed is the Droid Incredible, manufactured by HTC.  I have to say, this is really one incredible smartphone, and there is absolutely no pun intended!

The Droid Incredible or HTC Incredible (depending on where you see the name, it may be referred to by either name) is one of the fastest and lightest smartphones I have ever used.  In fact, I liked this phone so much, that I have switched to it as my full time smartphone.  It really is incredible.

Let's start with the hardware.  The phone is very light and nicely formed.  It has rounded edges and is very comfortable to hold, whether reading e-mail or talking on the phone.  It looks very similar to the iPhone and is probably the closest head to head competitor to the iPhone in terms of the complete package.  In side is one of the fastest smartphone processors on the market, a healthy amount of RAM and a whopping 8 megapixel camera.  The phone is very smooth and fast.  I have not encountered any issues related to hardware performance.  And, I have to say, the camera is the best I've seen yet, for a smartphone.  The still and video quality are excellent and I no longer carry around a small dedicated camera as a result.

In terms of the user interface, HTC adds what they call the Sense overlay to the standard Android interface.  While I wasn't sure early on, I have come to really like Sense.  It's adds some intuitive and very functional elements to the stock operating system that make it even more enjoyable to use.  As silly as this may sound, I love the weather gadget on the home screen.  It cracks me up that wipers come across the screen when it's raining and I have not seen any negative impact on the battery as a result.  Mostly, I like how it keeps the phone application front and center at the bottom of the screen. While I used to user LauncherPro on my Motorola Droid, I'm perfectly happy with the Sense interface on the Droid Incredible.  I also like the myriad of utility widgets that HTC provides for easy access to wireless, bluetooth and other settings.

Another very efficient overaly is the messaging interface.  HTC does a phenomenal job bringing together text and visual voice mail in one single and efficient interface that is extremely intuitive to work with.  Another nice feature of Sense is the seven home screens you can customize.  It makes the phone very functional.

In terms of user experience, size, weight, features, speed, memory and more, you just can't beat this device.  It really is the best smartphone I have seen to date and the fact that it has been on a 2+ week backorder since it's lauch speaks volumes.

I definitely recommend a screen protector for this device and I use the Seidio Innocase and holster along with the extended battery they offer in the standard size format, so I have two batteries, just in case.  However, to date, I have yet to exhaust the battery in a single days use.  I'm thoroughly impressed by that, because I use my Droid Incredible all day long!

If you are looking for a new smartphone or due for an upgrade, I strongly recommend the Droid Incredible.  You will not be disappointed.

Tech Talk: The increasingly intelligent 'smartphone'

I was not planning to write about smartphones again so soon, but this week's announcement of the latest iPhone by Apple as well as the recent announcement of new Android-based smartphones make this topic too timely to hold off.

The announcement this past Monday of the fourth generation iPhone has been eagerly anticipated. While the announcement did not hold anything nearly as revolutionary as the first announcement of the iPhone, Apple has certainly built on its innovative traditions by adding high-definition video and a front facing-video camera to enable video chat with this latest version. But perhaps most notably, the curves of the device have been slightly diminished and the size is being heralded as the world's thinnest smartphone to date. The screen is also so high quality that it has a higher resolution than is discernible by the human eye. In other words, it's crisp beyond description.

It's too soon to know if this latest edition of the iPhone will make it even more of a hit than it already is, but it is certainly not going to diminish its market share. The new iPhone will be available later this month, and we are sure to see droves of current owners rushing to upgrade to the latest hardware as well as causing many who have been holding off to dive right in.

Perhaps what was missing the most from the announcement of the new iPhone was its rumored arrival to the Verizon Wireless network. It didn't happen, at least not yet, and I will not waste column space speculating on whether it will come to carriers other than AT&T before the 2012 expiration of the reported exclusive contract between Apple and AT&T.

Over the past several months, Verizon Wireless has sent me several new Android-based smartphones to evaluate, the more recent being theHTC Droid Incredible, a phone I have begun to think of as the incredible Incredible. For those on the Sprint network, the new EVO 4G is a nearly identical device. What has impressed me the most about the Droid Incredible is similar to what impresses me about the iPhone. The intuitive nature of the device, aided in part by some additional software from HTC, manufacturer of the phone, that simply makes it a pleasure to use.

I have had several clients mention to me recently that they no longer rely on their notebook or home computer for remote access to their offices. Rather, they use their smartphones, whether an iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile or Blackberry device, to access much of what they need while they travel.

One client even boldly commented to me that he does not take his notebook with him on any business trips less than four days as he can stay in contact with everyone he needs to with his smartphone, including reviewing documents and spreadsheets. This more than anything illustrates just how far smartphones have come. Business people across industries are able to operate without their main computer for days at a time thanks to these devices. It's truly impressive.

Smartphones are capable of providing secure access to business resources at a much higher level than ever before.

To be able to carry a single device so thin and light as to be able to be comfortably placed in a shirt pocket that can access not just your e-mail but also files on the company network, securely and efficiently, is a real benefit to many in the business community.

From an information security point of view, the fact these connections are secure and encrypted is critically important. Moreover, the fact IT administrators have the tools to remotely wipe out and erase a lost and stolen device provides the security necessary for many industries.

These developments are part of what is fueling the rapid pace of development of these devices.

I plan to release my detailed review of the HTC Droid Incredible on my blog at mjsblog.jenaly.com over the coming week and may devote a future column to that review, as well.

In the meantime, if you have not made the move to a smartphone, I encourage you to do so.

You won't regret it.

Blog : Jenaly Technology Group shows how to “Green I.T.”

The following was posted to the Green Alliance Blog...

By Jim Cavan

In the “Green IT” section of their May Newsletter, Jenaly Technology Group introduced many on the Seacoast to “Granola”.

Not the oats and berries variety, mind you. More of the circuits and chips variety.

Released in January by MiserWare, a Blacksburg, Virginia IT company specializing in green and intelligent software management systems, Granola is a free software program that can help reduce your PC’s energy use by up to 30%.

Granola saves energy by applying dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) to the CPU of a system – sort of like a "dimmer switch." When a user is browsing the web or working on a document, Granola scales down the power needed; when the CPU is running at full blast for creating charts and graphs or other computing-intensive processes, the software draws more power.

While certainly a novel and welcome idea for anyone interested in reducing their individual carbon footprint, for Portsmouth-based Jenaly Technology Group, such advancements are par for the course.

Jenaly boasts a number of green approaches and programs that set them apart from others in their industry. Their Virtual System Administration (VSA) management services remotely service your computer to keep it running at maximum efficiency, cutting down on frequent updates, travel and maintenance time, and subsequently reducing e-Waste. Their Disaster Recovery service removes costly and wasteful tape media from your computer’s backup, reducing waste and making your backup capabilities more reliable.

Jenaly also boasts an impressive paperless filing and billing system, as they work towards their long term goal of being 100% digital. They work with several e-waste recyclers to help people dispose of their used computer parts responsibly, and they often encourage employees to work from home in order to reduce carbon emissions and needless travel time.

Then, of course, there’s the “Green IT” section, published in every monthly FY I.T. newsletter. The section provides readers with easy, common-sense solutions and alternatives to help them reduce their energy use, particularly with respect to their computer. Some past tips have included: encouraging downloading of software instead of having a CD delivered; showing how to convince suppliers to ship your equipment with minimal packaging; and providing guides to the country’s greenest electronics companies.

For Jenaly’s Customer Advocate Ellen Sargent, such initiatives reflect an ethos that everyone at Jenaly is proud to rally around. “In a nutshell – and this can be applied to a lot of industries – even the little things you do can make a huge difference,” says Sargent, who among other things is tasked with publishing Jenaly’s FYI.T. newsletter. “And because they are effective solutions that are also green, it’s a win-win.”

What are these “little things”? It can be anything from switching to online data backup, uploading as many as five servers onto one physical server to save energy, or even something as seemingly benign as single-spacing your documents. In the end, they all add up to a smarter, more efficient computer, while subtracting energy and waste from the equation.

They’re also making bigger moves to bring awareness to their ever-greening portfolio. In 2009 the company joined the Green Alliance, a Seacoast-based “green business union” and discount member co-op that helps raise the profile of local green businesses.

While many of these measures fall under the heading of common sense, Sargent maintains that everyone at Jenaly is encouraged to “think outside the box”.

“I remember one of the employees was fascinated with combining server spaces and really wanted to run with the idea,” Sargent recalls. “MJ told him to go for it, like he does with a lot of ideas that don’t necessarily fit into the current program. It’s that sense of experimentation that I think really makes our office unique.”

But for all the specific examples of how Jenaly is greening the face of IT, and for all the reasons they provide for doing so, the company’s commitment can perhaps be best summed up with the first eight words on their website’s Green IT section: “Simply put, it’s the right thing to do.”

Is 'green IT' living up to the hype?

Going green is everywhere. Whether it's recycling at home or the office, the cars we drive or the products we purchase, we all know there is a lot of momentum behind going green. Even the new fire station just opened in Portsmouth is being praised for its green construction, which will save taxpayers money not just today, but throughout the station's lifespan.

With all the awareness and sensitivity to green initiatives around us, it only stands to reason that we should occasionally ask ourselves if we are really improving things when trying to be more green. I think it's clear to most people that it's the right thing to do, but from a business sense, in addition to doing the right thing, will it also save our businesses money? I believe the answer is yes. And in the world of IT, I also think it's relatively straight-forward to monetize green initiatives as cost-saving measures, as well.

Especially as we move into the warmth of summer, one of the obvious areas is cooling. Computer technology generates a lot of heat, from the computer itself, the monitor and all the peripheral devices that drive a present-day office network. The more gear, the more heat. The more heat, the more cooling required. It's fairly simple in this respect. While at the individual desk this may not seem substantive, if your company runs multiple servers and associated networking devices, it may generate significant cooling requirements. This translates into power costs, not to mention maintenance of the cooling capacity, which may be significant.

I have seen several examples where power consumption may be reduced by as much as 30 percent by leveraging more power-efficient technology and even by simply putting computers to sleep when not in active use and turning off printers and monitors outside of business hours. Newer equipment has sophisticated power management capabilities that some manufacturers state are up to 80 percent more efficient. With even a few computers, an 80 percent gain in efficiency may translate into hard savings on monthly electric bills.

However, all this said, the real opportunity for IT to be more green starts with the manufacturing of the computer equipment and its ultimate disposal. Improvements in the manufacturing processes probably hold the most potential for improving the sustainability of technology hardware and this responsibility rests with the manufacturers themselves. That does not mean we, as users of these technologies, should not do what we can to help in the process. When we are ready to dispose of computers, they should never go into the office trash. Computer equipment needs to be properly recycled as there is a very large industry growing around providing these services. It's not difficult to find responsible companies that will come and pick up your old technology and repurpose it for good or properly recycle it. Every computer has hazardous metals and chemicals, and these need to be properly disposed of. This, too, is part of being greener.

There are many rapidly maturing technologies that will have a positive green impact on business. The adoption of more online, or cloud, technologies has the potential to allow businesses that are able to leverage these to be more green with their IT footprint. Paperless technologies also improve a company's green footprint as it allows a business to require less space for records storage as well as generate significantly less paper and printer waste.

Remote, mobile and telecommunication technologies all have a positive impact considering the reduction in space, power and emissions that each is able to deliver. Some of these have direct benefit to the business and some to the employee, but the net gain in terms of lower costs and less waste transcend both business and individual. Businesses that embrace these technologies also report gains in productivity and quality that translate to direct profits.

There is no shortage of opinions that challenge the benefits of green IT, however, I do believe green IT makes sense. I would expect to see some tangible cost savings for even the smallest offices. Globally, green IT makes even more sense as the potential to reduce environmental impact of our increasing use of technology is just good business, not to mention good stewardship of our environment.

Latest Article Published - Securing your data goes beyond the obvious

I have written several columns over the past year focusing on data privacy and security. Over this time, there have been several new regulations that have come into effect that require businesses to take specific steps to secure their customers' data.

With all that has been written, by myself and others, there are still an alarming amount of data breaches. Individual computer users and companies at large continue to do reckless things online that put data and business security at risk. You would think this would not be the case, but it is. A recent report by Consumer Reports notes more than 1.7 million cases of online identify theft over the last year. The report further stated more than 2.4 million individuals submitted information to phishing e-mail messages. Phishing e-mail messages are e-mails that often appear to be coming from legitimate organizations, like your bank, and ask you to reply with specific sensitive information, like your account number or other similar information. The report estimates the cost of cyber crime last year at $4.5 billion. That is a staggering cost and one that needs to be mitigated.

With the dramatic increase in use of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and others, this report and others find that people post far too many details about themselves, facilitating identity theft. Many surveys show people will post complete address information and even things like names of their children, which may potentially expose your children to online advances. The threats are numerous and getting very subtle, so vigilance and common sense needs to be stressed at every opportunity.

A threat often overlooked in the office environment is the office copier, more commonly referred to as the office multi-function device. These are your large copiers that are now much more; the network scanner, copier and fax machine. These devices have changed dramatically over the years. Remember when you got your first office copier how you had to place the document in the feeder and wait for the copier to warm up, then it would pull in the original and kick out the copies one by one. Today, everything is based on the scanning engine in these units. When you place your original document into the device, it will rapidly scan in the document and then print the copies. This has led to dramatic increases in efficiency with these devices, but it also has introduced a security threat very few people recognize. In fact, you may have seen a recent CBS news expose on this topic.

Simply stated, when you use these devices, the documents you are copying and scanning are being stored, albeit theoretically temporarily, on an internal hard drive within the device. After you have received your scanned document or taken your copies back to your desk, data on those documents remains on the internal hard drive. When the time comes to dispose of this device, either by direct disposal or a trade-in back to your vendor, the data goes with it. There are documented cases of multi-function devices being removed from medical offices and returned to the vendor and replaced with a new unit. When the returned unit was inspected and hard drive removed, sensitive medical data was retrieved from the drive and that medical office had just violated Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act privacy laws. This is a serious matter and one very few business people understand.

These devices are often leased and every few years, the vendor will replace the leased device with a new one. It's very important that part of the process be a secure wipe of the internal hard drive to ensure your business does not expose sensitive data or worse, unknowingly facilitate a data breach by not managing these devices properly.

As you can see, there continue to be many threats to your data security and privacy, some of which are obvious and some are not. It's important to maintain a dynamic information security policy in your organization that adapts with the changing landscape and helps you do everything possible to keep your systems and data safe.

Thanks for reading.

Windows 7 Has Impressive Repair Capabilities That Saved Mother's Day

This morning, I was faced with a possible Mother's Day crisis.  My wife's relatively new notebook had become a disaster.  Nothing was working and every Microsoft Office file she clicked on wanted to reinstall Office.  She was unable to browse the Internet, our local home network and I was unable to perform even the most basic diagnostic tests.

When inquiring as to the exact steps that she had taken right before this started happening, she pointed a Registry backup file on her Desktop and explained that she clicked on that, thinking that it would back up her PC as she had just completed a bunch of new work.  Ouch!  Impending disaster became very clear and resent.  Somehow, she did have a complete Registry backup on her Desktop, however, upon further investigation, this file was also from her old computer and must have come over as part of running the Windows Easy Transfer tool when we moved her over to the new PC.  I didn't notice it at the time, as I would have and should have removed it.

So, the damage was done.  She had overwritten her Registry with a copy from her old PC.  System Restore was not functioning and as expected, he PC Blue Screened on reboot.  The next reboot brought us to the expected Windows Repair option and it worked perfectly.  After several minutes of processing it's automated repair processes, her PC restarted and works perfectly.  A little manual cleanup on my part, as in removing that Registry backup file and any other executables on her Desktop and drive that could cause mischief, followed by a quick refresher that she, the user of the computer, is the last line of defense and should never click on something that she is not absolutely certain she knows what will do, and she is back at work doing what she loves.  My wife is does forensic genealogical research.  What could have been a Mother's Day catastrophe has been averted.  Her Mother's Day is a happy day, as is mine, though now I have to clean the kitchen, which I promised to do for her today.  I guess that really is better than spending my day restoring her computer and the stress that would cause her.  Of course, I have multiple backups of her PC, including one from 1:24 AM this morning, so it would not have been a difficult task, but this is a much better outcome all around.

Microsoft really has done it right with Windows 7 and this is just one more example.  Happy Mother's Day to all my readers.