August 2008
In this issue:
? Let Me Connect You
? How Big is Your Mailbox?
? Common PC Problems
? Is Your Data Protected
? Microsoft Demo
? Just for Laughs
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Is Your Data Protected?
How long would your business survive if your data disappeared overnight? Not long.
Click here to learn more about how we can protect you!
Create a design scheme to brand your business publications
To ensure that all your company publications and marketing materials reinforce your business brand, it's important that your logo, colors, fonts, and other branding elements are used in a consistent way. Microsoft Office Publisher 2007 makes it easy to choose and save design details and business information — including a company logo — to use whenever you want to create a business card, data sheet, brochure, or other business publication.
Start with a predesigned scheme and then customize the color, font, page format, and more. You'll see your choices reflected instantly in a design preview as you click through the options. When you're finished, save the customized scheme to use in all your business publications. Watch the demo to see how it's done.
Just For Laughs
If all the cars in the United States were placed end to end,
it would probably be called
Labor Day Weekend.
-Doug Larson
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Let Me Connect You
Jane Cage, COO, HTS
 Not too long ago, the phrase “Let me connect you” would have only come from a telephone operator. Today, it’s just as likely to come to my inbox as I receive emails from colleagues, business partners, friends and relatives who want to connect to me through one of today’s electronic social networking sites. At age 52, this is a new phenomenon for me. On the other hand, teenagers are completely tuned in to this concept – they all have a Myspace or Facebook account. So, does it make sense in the business world? I decided to find out.
Linked in (http://www.linkedin.com) seems to be the business networking site of choice. Linked In has a simple philosophy: Relationships Matter. On their website, they state “Our mission is to help you be more effective in your daily work and open doors to opportunities using the professional relationships you already have.” When you join Linked In, you create a profile that summarizes your work and educational accomplishments. The profile helps you to be found by other businesspeople on the site. You can also invite contacts you trust (you must know their email address) to join the site and connect to you.
Once you are linked to another person, you are able to see their contacts and ask them to link to you as well. It has the potential to become a giant “Six Degrees of Separation” experiment. When you click on a contact, you can see what links you have in common. From the profile you create, you can also search and be searched on attributes such as industry, keywords, etc. You can even write a “reference” for a contact that is posted for everyone to see. So, how has it worked for me? I have found it useful to link myself not only to colleagues within my industry but also with our clients. One of my links to a client brought a great business opportunity our way when a friend of the client saw my name and company on the clients space, remembered the good things that client had said about me and called me.
Read more
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| How Big is Your Mailbox?
 We have spent a lot of time recently (which translates to a lot of extra expense for our customers) troubleshooting, managing, and working with VERY large mailboxes.
From a purely technical standpoint, once a mailbox gets over a GB in size, it starts to become a minor challenge in terms of supporting it, speed of access and search, and management in general. Once a mailbox gets to be over 2 GB in size, we start to run into some very serious limitations that will manifest in support, management, and disaster recovery scenarios.
Believe us when we say we are VERY heavy Outlook users, but using a few simple techniques, it is not much of a challenge at all to keep our own mailboxes under the 1 GB limit we need to keep us ‘light on our feet’ with our own mailboxes.
First: archive! Outlook has a built in archive feature that will remove things from your mailbox and put them into a long term storage file. Our technique is to add to that archive file daily until it gets to be between 1 and 2 GB in size, then burn that to a DVD (so that it isn’t taking up space on the server). This can easily be set up to happen automatically in Outlook, and you can get very granular in your control of what gets archived, how old it has to be before archive, etc. Just ask us for help to get this set up.
Read more
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4 Common PC Problems You Can Fix Yourself
By Kim Komando Microsoft Small Business Center
 Computer problems may seem immensely complicated at first glance. But some are relatively easy to fix.
That doesn't mean they will be cheap if someone else does the job. Replacing a hard drive is probably a minimum $250-$300 job at a computer shop.
However, some jobs can be done by the average Joe or Jane. On a scale of 1 to 10 (where 10 should only be performed by certified technicians who have no less than three electronic gadgets on their belt), replacing memory is usually about a 4. Installing a new hard drive is tougher (about 6 or 7), but still do-able. Replacing a video card or internal modem is no more than a 2.
A word of caution: Static electricity can kill the circuitry inside your computer. Before you reach for anything inside that box, ground yourself by touching the metal computer frame.
Here are four common PC problems you may be able to fix by yourself:
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