Do you use email? Do you work on a team? Sweet, then this will probably be useful!

Distribution groups let you send messages to any number of recipients, large or small, using only a single name. That’s right, you don’t have to enter each individual email address each time you want to send your team a message. A distribution group is also super easy to manage—you can add and delete recipients at will, so if someone joins or leaves the team, you don’t have to create a whole new list.

Follow the following steps to create a distribution group of your own:

1. Open Outlook and open your Address Book, located in the “Home” tab at the far right.

2. This will bring up your global address list. Click “File” from the top and select “New Entry…” This will bring up another window.

3. Select “New Contact Group” and click “OK.” This will create a new contact group.

4. You can now add members to my distribution group by pressing (you guessed it) “Add Members.” You can choose to add from Outlook Contacts (any recipient from your personal contacts), from Address Book (any recipients in the Global Address List), and New E-mail contact (create a new contact).

For Outlook Contacts and Address Book, another window will open that shows the list of possible contacts I can include in your distribution group.

5. Let’s say that I want to send a message to three of my office buddies. I double click each of their names in order to add them as members of the group and then click “OK.”

6. Now I give the distribution group a title by entering text into the “Name:” field.

7. Click “Save & Close,” and from now on I will be able to send to all three as if they were a single contact:

Pretty easy, huh? Now you don’t have to worry about remembering everybody on your team’s email address. Just don’t forget to update your distribution group whenever personnel changes take place in your organization.

Seriously though, you totally have to check out this video during your next coffee break.

Responza has been around long enough to have catalogued a collection of worrying trends that crop up in small businesses, regardless of the industry they represent. You may have created the greatest product in your field, but if you’re making any one of these five mistakes then your business is at risk.

We also created a few directed questions that you can ask your IT service provider so that you don’t fall victim.

So without further ado, here are the five most common mistakes that a small business can make with regard to its IT:

1) Using consumer-grade equipment to run business-grade operations
You want your organization up and running at all times, but you bought a home edition? Business products are more expensive for a reason: they work. Don’t cut corners to keep your budget down. It’ll come back to bite you sooner rather than later.

2) Using hardware longer than it should be used
Each piece of technology has a lifespan. Servers and PC hardware usually last between three and five years before they show signs of bloatware or failure, and yet we continue to see 8, 10, and even 12 year old machines in production environments. People seem to not understand that these things can and will die, and that they will be left in the cold if they don’t plan for this.

Three things you can count on: death, taxes, and hardware failure.

Note: There is a way to use the predictability of a technology’s lifecycle to your advantage. For example, in a technical architecture that employs thin clients and Terminal Services, all work is carried out on the server. This means that you can use the thin client until the day it drops dead and then go out and get a new one without losing any of your data. The cost difference is pretty big—about $330 for a decent thin client versus approximately $1,150 for a PC in the box—and thin clients have a working life of about two to three times that of PCs.

This technical architecture strategy highlights the strength of an investment in a server. Servers are more reliable than desktops systems, they are faster and more efficient in processing data, and they allow your employees to easily and quickly access that data. The fact of the matter is if you are going to invest in a piece of hardware—and believe me, this is a good investment—you should recognize that it has a limited lifespan, and you should plan to replace it.

3) Lax security
Whether it’s an easy password or an open environment, small business networks are almost always exposed somehow. Hacker culture has changed, and it’s time to stop pretending that you’re immune to attacks. Gone are the days when teenagers in their basements clumsily hacked networks just to get a little bit of attention. Today’s hackers want to silently slip into your systems, and the name of the game is financial gain. Every business ought to have a proper firewall to protect their assets.

4) Not taking advantage of backup software
Some operating systems come with basic backup software already built in, but small businesses seem to either not see it or ignore it. We recommend a more sophisticated backup solution to our customers, but every small business should be creating backups of their data and regularly testing them.

5) Working without a roadmap
Your business should be planned, and for the most part it probably already is. You have project plan; you have a sales process; you even have procedures in place for who goes out to buy coffee when the office supply runs low. But when it comes to IT, small organizations all too often are working with the blinders on. At the very minimum, you should be planning out your IT initiatives and upgrades at least once a year, if only to take account of your ongoing hardware and software needs. But you really shouldn’t stop there. You also need to plan ahead and budget for any additional manpower or tech support that inevitably jumps out to bite you when you least expect it. Establishing a baseline plan for your IT needs will allow you to get that much more out of those systems.

Every organization needs a technology roadmap.

In order for IT to help drive your business, you need to know at least something about your systems. Now, I’m not asking you to sign up for computer science courses in your free time, because—let’s face it—you don’t have any free time.

Luckily, you don’t have to review and evaluate everything that goes into creating your IT infrastructure. Here are a few questions you can arm yourself with to see through the hype, the buzzwords, and the fog, and get to where IT is truly delivering value in your business.

1) Is IT giving me the freedom to transform and grow my business, or is it holding me back (or, even worse, is it endangering my business)?
Before you can ask anything of your IT service provider, you need to ask this of yourself. The purpose of this question is not to get you thinking about the strategic use of this or that piece of technology. The point is to find the ideal means of interacting with and serving your customers, because at the end of the day IT is a tool to drive business.

2) Are we ignoring key business differences as we standardize across the company?
This question follows very logically with the previous one. As soon as business owners light on something that works, they often tend to mandate and standardize. While standardization can be a boon to your business, it can also choke some departments. Take the thin client-Terminal Services approach mentioned above in mistake #2. Just because thin clients are cheaper doesn’t mean they are necessarily better. Some employees will be perfectly fine with a thin client, whereas others may need to harness the awesome power of a personal computer. The crucial idea here is not to use blanket standardization with your IT because even though it may be simpler to manage, it might end up strangling your business. Instead, standardize selectively.

3) Who is in charge of implementing my technology strategy and enforcing my technology policies?
When you bring together your decision makers and your managers, the people who know what the company needs in order to succeed, don’t forget to include your top IT guy so that together they can start coming up with the methods of using technology to your advantage. However, this senior management group should not be in charge of implementing company-wide processes. This is the job of a designated process owner. This person takes the input from the senior team, designs the system, trains the users, and then after implementation, monitors the performance of both the people and the machines in order to establish metrics and ensure continuous improvement, which they then report to the senior team. What’s important here is that you realize that while you are in charge of creating the ideas, you should not be in charge of implementation. Now you just need to find the right manager who can.

It is for precisely this reason that when we at Responza are taking on a new client, we always start off with what we call an “IT Gap Analysis,” which allows us to evaluate current systems, processes, and strategies so that we can identify any problems or issues with their Information Technology systems and procedures. Following this, we regularly hold strategic planning sessions to ensure that business goals and IT plans are aligned.

To learn more about how Responza can help you circumvent these mistakes (and many others!), call 206-762-5100 or email solutions@responza.com today.

Everyone has bad habits. Some of these habits are benign, but others can have very serious consequences.

For example, we are advised time and time again not to use peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent, and yet we continue to do so. Even when we’re not using this file-sharing protocol illegally (i.e., downloading the latest movies), there’s still cause for alarm. If you’re not worried about the consequences of peer-to-peer file-sharing, you should be. And here’s why.

Do you use Skype? This may seem like it has nothing to do with P2P, but stick with me.

Skype is a powerful tool that businesses can and should use to communicate both internally and externally. But it does require that users divulge a modicum of information. When a user signs up for Skype, they must provide an e-mail address and create a Skype ID. They can also provide personal information, such as birth name, location, gender, age, and website. This information is recorded in the Skype directory.  Naturally, you shouldn’t be giving any of this sort of information out, but you still have to create that Skype ID. It turns out that this simple piece of information can be observed by anyone, and that poses a terrifying possibility: who is watching you?

A research team with members from Germany, France, and the United States created a scheme that was able to find a targeted person’s Skype ID and inconspicuously call that person to find their IP address. This scheme was used periodically to observe the mobility of that Skype user, tracking where they operated from.

Furthermore, they found that Skype does not attempt to hinder this sort of scheme with any sort of countermeasures. In fact, even though the researchers informed Skype of major privacy vulnerabilities back in May (the same month that the company was acquired by Microsoft), these vulnerabilities have not been addressed.

The researchers then used their scheme to link Skype and BitTorrent to show how it is possible to determine the file-sharing usage of identified users.  Here’s a sample of what they found:

This is only with a handful of users, but the researchers drew from a set of 100,000. Plus, the researchers limited their scheme to link only Skype and BitTorrent. There are any number of other communication services and P2P networks that bad guys can target to get to your personal information.

This isn’t an indictment of Skype. You should just know that even with modest financial resources, it can be pretty easy to gain access to your personal information. Simply put, the researchers hypothesize that any Internet user can find out who you are, where you are, and what you are downloading and uploading on peer-to-peer networks, all simply by finding your Skype ID. Now that’s scary!
You can read the whole study at http://cis.poly.edu/~ross/papers/skypeIMC2011.pdf.

BitTorrent, and other P2P networks like Vuze and The Pirate Bay, suck up bandwidth, waste employee time, provide viruses with an easy entry point into your network, and often straddle the line of legality. Granted, P2P makes it easy to share information with others, but the risks involved clearly outweigh the rewards. Luckily, there is an alternative: Microsoft SharePoint. Stay tuned for more on SharePoint later this year…

So how do you control P2P on your network? You can monitor your network’s bandwidth usage to spot applications like these, and even block them at the firewall. You should also create and circulate a company Internet policy, if you haven’t already. Responza has a pretty simple policy when it comes to BitTorrent: don’t!

For a sample policy or to learn more about how you can keep your personal information secure, call (206) 762-5100 or send an e-mail to solutions@responza.com.

We’ve gotten a great deal of positive feedback regarding tips on the ins and outs of Microsoft Office applications, so we’ve decided to make it a regular feature in our News You Can Use. If you’re not already subscribed to this free newsletter you can sign up on our homepage, www.responza.com. This one concerns the use of keyboard shortcuts to format documents in Word 2010.

Click. Drag. Highlight. Go to the Page Layout tab in the ribbon at the top and manually adjust the indentation. What a drag. You may think you’re saving time because you know that you can access this in the Paragraph region of the Home tab in the ribbon, but you should know that there’s a way to do this sort of thing even faster: keyboard shortcuts.

Suppose you’re working on a proposal. You’re done with the content, and all that’s left before you send it to the prospect is formatting.

Let’s say you have a coworker who has a habit of stealing and hiding your mouse while you’re away. Instead of using Chinese Water Torture to find out where your mouse is and finish that proposal, you can take advantage of the built-in formatting styles of Word 2010 with these simple keyboard shortcuts, and devise a better way of getting back at that coworker later.

1)      Apply styles- through these keyboard shortcuts, you can quickly and efficiently take advantage of built-in styles of Word 2010 to create headings, bullets, and normal text in your proposal:

• Ctrl + Shift + N = apply Normal style
• Ctrl + Shift + L = apply List Bullet style
• Ctrl + Alt + 1 = apply Heading 1 style
• Ctrl + Alt + 2 = apply Heading 2 style
• Ctrl + Alt + 4 = apply Heading 3 style
• Ctrl + Shift + S = open the Apply Styles dialogue box, where you can choose any style available to the document

2)      Adjust font size- maybe your proposal needs some fine print, which is easy to create:

• Ctrl + ] (right bracket) = increase size of selected text by 1 point
• Ctrl + [ (left bracket) = decrease size of selected text by 1 point
• Ctrl + Shift + > = increase selected text to the next largest installed point size
• Ctrl + Shift + < = decrease selected text to the next smallest installed point size

3)      Modify line or paragraph spacing- add some white space and improve the readability of your proposal:

• Ctrl + 0 = apply or remove 12 points of space above the current paragraph
• Ctrl + 5 = apply 1.5 line spacing to the current paragraph
• Ctrl + 2 = double-space the lines in the current paragraph

4)      Transfer formatting- you can quickly transfer existing formats from one block of text to another, and you just add one key to the copy-paste keyboard shortcut that you already know

• Ctrl + Shift + C = copy the formatting of selected text
• Ctrl + Shift + V = apply the copied formatting to a new selection

5)      Remove manually applied formatting- this is especially useful when working with documents created by others who use extraneous formatting; get rid of all that manual formatting and get back to the document’s underlying styles:

• Ctrl + Spacebar = remove character formatting, leaving just the formatting of the default character style
• Did you know you can change the default character style? Click here to learn how.
• Ctrl + Q = remove paragraph formatting, leaving just the formatting of the paragraph style applied to the selected paragraphs

Using these keyboard shortcuts should drastically reduce the amount of time it takes you to format your documents.

Got a request for a Microsoft Office tip or trick? Let us know in the comments below or shoot an e-mail to solutions@responza.com.

Mac users may feel pretty safe in the workplace when it comes to the security of their machines, but a recent trend in malware tailored specifically for Macs should make them realize that they need protection too.

But before we dive into actual malware on Macs, let’s cover some basic security measures first. The default settings on a Mac are not at all optimal for security. You should definitely change these.

Open “System Preferences”

Select the “Accounts” icon under “System”; in Lion, this will be “Users & Groups”

Click on “Login Options,” located in the white space on the left side of the window.

Change “Automatic login:” to Off, change “Display login window as:” to Name and password, and uncheck the box for “Show password hints.” Don’t forget to click the lock icon at the bottom left of the window.

Now go back to “System Preferences” and select the “Security” icon under “Personal”; this will be “Security & Privacy” on Lion

Under the “General” tab of the “Security” window

Turn the “Require password” on and select immediately from the drop-down. Under “For all accounts on this computer:” check the box for “Disable automatic login.” (Mine is grayed out because I have FileVault enabled, which disables any user from automatically logging in, but more on FileVault in a moment.) If this is a shared Mac and you would like to prevent other users (who are not admins) from undoing any of this, check the box for “Require an administrator password to unlock each System Preferences pane.”

Now before you go and turn your FileVault (or FileVault 2 on Lion) on, know this. It can cause a Mac to become unresponsive, it can prevent users from logging into their accounts, and it can even permanently damage or destroy user data. So before you switch this setting on, know that if mobile workers use this machine or if the data on the machine is so sensitive that it needs to be protected at any or all costs, then you probably shouldn’t mess around with this setting.

The Firewall tab is a bit more easily understood. Just like a physical firewall, the Mac’s internal firewall helps prevent undesired traffic from entering or existing the system. If enabled, it can cause some issues, such as file-sharing or iChat errors or not being able to find other machines on the network, so if the machine is already within your workplace network then I would advise against turning this setting on. However, if you are a mobile user who must frequently use remote networks, then this firewall software is great at reducing your level of risk. Still, it is worth looking into getting good anti-virus on your machine to be doubly sure, but let’s return to the basic settings and we’ll get back to Mac A-V momentarily.

Go back to “System Preferences” and select the “Desktop & Screen Saver” icon under “Personal”

The particular screen saver you select is not important, but you do need to set the slider beneath “Start screen saver:” to an appropriate amount of time. I set mine at around 20 minutes so that I don’t get interrupted when I’m doing e-learning, but so that my machine still gets locked down in a reasonably short amount of time.

Now let’s get into the title subject of this post: malware on Macs.

It’s not for me to say whether Macs are truly prone to malware. That’s a tough case to make with Apple purists—you can take it up with our security experts at (206) 762-5100—but everyone should be able to accept that a Mac can act as a carrier of malware. So how can you stop your machine from passing on viruses?

Macs come with XProtect, a piece of rudimentary anti-virus software, built in. XProtect is limited; it can’t do more than stop the most basic of intruders. Luckily, Sophos has developed a free anti-virus for Mac home users. However, the home edition can’t handle the onslaught that businesses face every day. Responza partners with Sophos to provide best-in-breed security to our business customers, and we feel that it is an important safeguard for our customers to consider.

But back to the recent trend of Mac-directed malware. A series of trojans have been making the rounds since earlier this fall.

Flashback.A, the first in the series, was discovered in late September. The aim of its creators is to connect the infected machine to a remote server and transmit stolen data, such as the infected machine’s unique MAC address. Flashback.B, discovered earlier this month, keeps the trojan from installing on virtualized Mac OS X environments. Flashback.C, the latest version in the series, looks like an update to Adobe Flash and requires users to enter their admin password to install. Once installed, the trojan disables the automatic updater component of XProtect. Ultimately, this creates a path for the trojan’s creators to maximize their financial gain.

Now that you know what you’re up against, you’ll need to start prepping your defense.

Want to learn more about Sophos or give it a test run? Let us know at solutions@responza.com

Over the years, the IT landscape has changed dramatically.  Every few years brings the release of a new software platform from Microsoft, or the next innovative design from Apple.  And the refractory period between each new product release has shrunk considerably and innovation brings exciting new solutions to market.

Unfortunately, as the technology has evolved, so have the threats that face it.  Every day, security problems grow with more sophisticated external and internal threats that have more channels into your network.  Traditional firewalls are no longer capable of keeping up, so how can you stay strong?

Ever heard of a Next Generation Firewall?

You’re thinking, “I already have a firewall, why should I buy a new one?”  But ask yourself a few questions: What applications are running on your network?  What exactly is consuming your bandwith?  Where is your network traffic coming from?  What Web 2.0 apps are being accessed and what ports are they coming through?

Chances are, you don’t know.  And that’s perfectly reasonable, because a typical network solution can’t provide these answers.  You’ll also be surprised by how much bandwith you’re unwittingly dedicating to Facebook and Netflix.

Approximately 25% of all office Internet traffic is non-business related.  Chances are your company network is exposed to malware such as Trojans that can deliver botnet agents or worse.  And, not to make the situation seem worse, many of these attacks succeed without user knowledge or involvement.

“But what about the anti-virus software on my computer?” you might be wondering.  An excellent, excellent question.  It’s certainly no unnecessary.  If a virus has a chance to attack before your computer’s anti-virus can take effect, your whole system is compromised.

Firewalls on the other hand are less susceptible to viruses.  Running anti-virus from your firewall provices a layered security approach whereby traffic is scanned at the edge of the network rather than at various points on the inside.  Having this gateway anti-malware layer will significantly  reduce your operational risk.

And unlike mupltiple point solutions, such as stateful firewalls, intrusion prevention, URL filtering, and remote access appliances – all of which require seperate support contracts and distinct subscriptions – Next Generation Firewalls featured Unified Threat Management.  That way, you get comprehensive security, intrusion prevention, and content filtering from a single device.

These new firewalls provide an unprecedented level of security.  Next Generation Firewalls identify, categorize, and control network traffic using Deep Packet Inspection, which goes through every byte in every packet as it enters and exits your network to identify the applications that are in use and who is using them.  This includes Web traffic, e-mail, compressed file transfers, IM, P2P… everything that has anything to do with your network gets the full enterprise-class protection it deserves.

This may sound like it would drastically reduce your network speed, but the Next Generation Firewall actually has near-zero latency.  Not only will your network be better protected, it will be faster as well.

Next Generation Firewalls are equipped with something called Application Intelligence and Control which gives you the visibility you need to prevent threats.  Instead of a flurry of numbers running across your screen, you get a clean picture of what applications are being used in real-time.  Now you can enforce your policies, guaranteeing bandwith prioritization and ensuring maximum network security and productivity.

Next Generation Firewalls also access a continuously expanding cloud-based threat signature database, which means that even if your device hasn’t ever encountered a particular instance of malware, it is smart enough to detect and reject it.

That’s why Responza is partnering with SonicWALL to provide you with a totally managed Next Generation Firewall, complete with Unified Threat Management, Deep Packet Inspection, and Application Intelligence and Control.

Questions?  Want to protect yourself better?  Give me a call at (206) 762-5100 or shoot an e-mail to solutions@responza.com.

To learn more Responza’s stance on network security, visit www.responza.com/firewall.html.

I’ve heard a lot of questions about how to make a good picture or graphical representation of where a company or organization stands in terms of meeting its sales or fundraising goals.  It’s the fourth quarter of 2011; time to put away the markers and cardboard paper and learn how to quickly and easily set up a thermometer-style graph in Microsoft Excel.

Let’s say that our company wants to get a puppy.  We’ve done our homework, found our breeder, and picked out the dog.  He’s coming in November

In order for this pup to grow up big and strong, he’s going to need food.  A lot of food.  I did the math, and it seems like $300 worth of puppy chow is a good goal to shoot for.  And the best way to support this puppy’s eating habits is going to be a fundraiser because even though I’m broke, I don’t feel the least bit bad about guilting other people into donating.  Plus, who doesn’t like puppies?

We start by creating a new Excel spreadsheet and listing each day in seperate cells of the first column.  I want some accountability – so that we can know who donates how much each day – and so I’ve created a seperate column for the five people I’ve passed the collection plate to.  Each day, I enter the amount that each person has donated.  I’ve also put in some summing formulas in the “Totals:” and Grand Total:” rows and I created an equation for our percent acheived (grand total divided by goal).

From the data, I can see that our sales guy Avery is happy to donate a little bit each and every day; he even threw in ten bucks when he landed a big deal.  Eric, our help desk whiz, either hates puppies or he seems to have had no regard for our little pup (until I showed him how bad he looked on the chart, that is).  John, our in-house Brit, threw in fifty cents each week because he doesn’t know how to convert from the Queen’s £, but we thank him kindly just the same.  Kris is also donating like clockwork, and over the weekend she apparently realized she could throw in a bit more.  Lance seems to be warming to idea more and more each week.  But I’m just a marketing guy, and all these numbers and equations scare me.  I want a nice picture that lets me know where we stand.  Is this puppy going to get the food he so desperately needs?

I choose the cell containing our percent acheived value, select “insert” from the ribbon at the top, click “Column,” and pick the first graph that catches my eye:

This creates a pretty ugly graph though, so we’ve got a bit of work to do before we arrive at the nice pretty graph we’re looking for.

First I’m going to get rid of the unnecessary parts of this graph.  I change the title, and then get rid of the x-axis label, the legend, and the lines in the middle of the graph.  Much cleaner:

Now, I want the percent on there, so I right-click the bar in my graph and select “Add Data Labels.”

I also want my bar to be a bit wider, but this is purely an aesthetic choice.  If you’d also like to do this, you just right-click the bar again, and select “Format Data Series.”

That will open up a window and I’ll change the Gap Width to 55%:

Gorgeous…

…but the y-axis only goes up to 20%.

To change this, simply righ-click the y-axis region and select “Format Axis”:

The Minimum and Maximum values are currently set to “Auto,” but if we click the “Fixed” bubble we can change this.  I want the y-axis to go from 0% to 100%, so we fix the values to 0.0 and 1.0 (remember these are percentages, not values).

Then we can close the window.  Suddenly, our graph is much more informative:

And since the graph is connected to values that change, it will automatically be updated each time I enter a new donation into my table.

Personally, I’m festive.  Halloween’s coming up, so I’m going to change the chart design to something more appropriate.  You can do this by selecting the whole graph, clicking “Design” from the ribbon at the top, and then picking the chart style that suites you.  I like this one:

Nice…

Uh oh, it’s already halfway through the month and we’re not even a fifth of the way there!  Maybe if I post this on the web, we can get some more donations…

Check out www.responza.com/software-support.html to learn more about Responza’s offerings in software support and evaluation.

And for Bert, send your donation to a shelter of your choice!  Thanks.

Everyone knows how to cut-and-paste a table from Excel into Word, but did you know you cuild that same table – actually, you can build a much more elegant one – in Word 2010?

So now, instead of switching back and forth from an Excel spreadsheet and a Word document, you can take advantage of the excellent Table functions built into Word 2010.

There are three easy ways to make a table in your Word document, and they all start at the “Insert” tab on your ribbon.

1) Preformatted table templates

From this tab, you can pick any ready-made table that suits you.

• All sort of calendar templates – no more typing out each and every day into each cell
• Matrices ranging from simple to complex
• The double table template is especially helpful

But maybe you’re looking for something slightly different than what Microsoft has developed. Instead of going through the trouble of adding rows and columns and adjusting height and width in the preformatted templates, you can create your own table:

2) Table Menu

Here I’m about to create a three-by-three table.

The user interface on this function is pretty great. Hover your mouse over the cell corresponding to the number of rows and columns you want and it’s there – even before you click, so you can see what your table is going to look like. You can add in your own flourishes – color shading, border weight, font size – as you fill the table in.

3) Insert Table dialog box

The good old fashioned “Insert Table…” function lets you do pretty much the same thing, but it gives you more options up front. Don’t want to adjust the size of the cells? Use the Autofit options.

It’s easy to confuse this function with “Draw Table,” which can be useful, but it can also be a huge waste of time because it’s much less intuitive than Microsoft would like us to think. If you are familiar with it, though, it can be a lot of fun:

Tic-Table-Toe:

Game!

Now you know three ways to quickly create a table in your Word doc! And since you’ve created your table so quickly, you can spend more time actually inputting the information you needed to organize in the first place…

…or not!

Need some more help with what you can from Word 2010? Let us know at solutions@responza.com.

Back in August, Australians were warned by Microsoft of a phone scam that fools people into giving cold callers their cash. Microsoft issued a press release, hoping they could nip this one in the bud, but the scamming seems to have spread to the U.S. Here’s how the scheme works:

Someone claiming to represent Microsoft or one of its brands contacts the victim and tells them that their computer has a problem, an infection, or a virus that Microsoft’s scanners were able to detect. The scammer then directs the victim to a website that allows the scammer to remotely control the computer. Finally, the scammer shows the victim these “problems,” and convinces the victim to pay for “services” rendered.

People: please don’t get fooled by these types of calls. Scammers are simply tricking people into believing that a problem exists when it really doesn’t. Sure, there might be something wrong with your computer, but wouldn’t you rather have someone you trust check it out?

And the sad thing is that even if something is actually wrong with your computer, Microsoft would never contact you first. You – or your trusted IT managed services provider – would need to create a support ticket with Microsoft. I’ll say this again: they will never contact you first.

So while it seems like you’re always shelling out for the latest from Microsoft, this is one case where even they say it’s safer to just hang up.

Thirty years ago, when mainframes ruled and personal computers were but a distant dream, desktops were referred to as “terminals”. When intelligence was added shortly after (i.e., a PC rather than a “dumb” terminal), they become “clients.” These machines were able to access services through a server, which was usually on another machine.

The client evolved in several directions. The “fat client” (aka the “heavy”, “rich”, and “think” client) followed in the original client’s footsteps. It was generally able to function on its own, without accessing a whole lot of services on the central server.

The “think client” on the other hand took advantage of its surroundings, a highly structered yet underutilized network environment. The thin client could easily access all the programs and services on the server, so they shed some weight (yes, literally) by only incorporating the bare minimum into their hardware.

So while thin clients may look like a desktop PC on the surface, they do all their computing (such as Microsoft Office, Internet applications, and QuickBooks) on the server. As with any piece of technology, the client has its ups and downs.

Some advantages include:

Thin clients also give you a boost to security since operating system patches and application updates can be done from a central location outside normal work hours.

Naturally, there are some drawbacks to going with thin clients:

Luckily, these pros and cons are just the beginning. Among the latest generations on the tree of computing evolution are ultra-thin clients, and even hybrid clients.

For companies with good IT reference architecture already in place, it is worth considering the road ahead. After all, IT is supposed to drive business.

What does your IT roadmap say?

To find out if a thin client is right for your business, give us a call at (206) 762-5100 or shoot us an email.