Blue Collar Computing

It is our hope that you do not fall into the category of AT&T cell phone users who walk into their office and experience a no-service nightmare. After all, isn’t making actual calls what cellular phones were invented for? If you do fall into that category, don’t lose hope. There is a solution. Below, we’ll show you how to fix bad AT&T Service at your office.

Starting today, July 20th, the new domain names ending in .co are available to the public! This is a perfect time for all companies to snatch up their easy to remember domain name they haven't been able to get with .com.

A lot of our clients running Windows Vista have misconceptions in regards to Windows 7. They know they despise Vista but they don't want to pay for Microsoft's latest and "greatest" operating system and lose all their programs, settings, documents, etc. Furthermore, they believe that if Vista is slow, this can't be that much better. Well there's good news and bad news. You will have to pay for 7 but you don't have to lose all that information!

How much is your data worth? Now that we're well into 2010 everyone knows that backups of all important data (company docs, resumes, pictures of the kids) is something that can't be overlooked. In fact, many have already had the disaster scenario and learned the hard way! But still, what's the right way to backup data for you or your company?

In a recent report by a leading laptop warranty provider, it was found that Asus and Toshiba are the least likely to malfunction after both 2 and 3 years of service. After 2 years both came in right under 10% and at 3 years around 15.6%. In order from least to most hardware malfunctions are Asus, Toshiba, Sony, Apple, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, Gateway, and HP. On the far end, HP had a 25.6% failure rate after 3 years. Separately, it was shown that netbooks have a higher failure than standard or entry level laptops after only one year of service.

Google has entered a deal to provide free WiFi to Airport travelers as a holidy time gift. The free access starts today, November 10th and will run through January 15th. Upon connecting users will be asked if they'd like their homepage set to Google and if they'd like to try the Google web browser, Chrome. "This is one of our holiday gifts to our users, and when you connect, we also hope you'll take the opportunity to try some of the latest Google products," a Google spokesperson commented.

A recent study by Cisco and Verizon showed that companies and government agencies utilizing IP based (Internet or Intranet) collaboration tools had a 4.2x return on collaboration. The companies polled used voice over IP (VoIP) phones, video conferencing, instant messaging (IM), and mobile collaboration. The study titled "Meetings Around the World II: Charting the Course of Advanced Collaboration" confirmed what many of our customers know already know. It showed that companies providing staff with strong, constantly available collaboration tools, provided better sales, research and development, and marketing. If your company is not yet using VoIP, IM, or any form of Groupware then the IT infrastructure isn't being fully utilized. BCC is partnered with companies like Cisco, Novell, and NotifyLink provide all of these solutions and more.

Recently several customers had asked us about an email they received claiming to be from the IRS. The email said that they had unreported income and that they needed to click a link to provide important information. They were skeptical and rightly so. This is a tactic known as phishing. In case you're wondering, phishing is the act of luring someone on the Internet to provide personal information such as passwords and social security numbers. It's a method of 'social engineering'. As with scam emails you may have received in the past, the first tip off is when they ask for information without verifying they know who you are. By using a reputable company or organization name, such as the IRS, the scammers hope that you won't think twice and will provide whatever information requested. They simply ask you to click a link that takes you to a website which will be designed to look like the company they falsely represent. They will use the same logos and sometimes the exact same website design that the real company has. An easy trick to be able to detect if the email in question is a scam or not, is to mouse over the link. Simply put your mouse cursor over the link they want you to click on and then look at the bottom of your screen to see the entire link. If you don't see the actual link when doing a mouseover, right click and copy the link location. Then go to a document editor and right click and paste. This will show you the true link. Typically what the text in the email shows for the link, will be different than what the actual link is. For example: Text link in email: http://www.irs.gov/update Actual link revealed after mouse over: http://www.irs.americainfo.com/update While they look quite similar, there is a big difference in these two links. The text shown, and the actual link can be quite different. The first link would take you to the legitimate IRS website while the second (where the link actually goes) would send you to a part of some website called americainfo.com. This would be a compromised server that was taken over to collect personal information through the email scam. As always, when in doubt you should contact the company in question. If it's a company you've done business with before, call them directly with a known valid number and inquire about the questionable email. They'll be more than happy to clarify and also to know if someone is using their company name for a scam!

Rumors have been flying recently that Intel and Microsoft are going to be forming a partnership to push managed services. For Intel, they will push vPro technology which is integrated into certain desktops and laptops and allows system administrators and managed services providers (MSP) to remotely manage systems even when they are turned off. For Microsoft, they will more than likely be integrating vPro and MSP friendly features in the new Windows 7 operating system coming October 22nd. Intel's vPro technology has been around for a few years now but without wide adoption. The main reason for this is that while it is very thorough and helpful, it can be quite a task to get setup and requires higher cost systems. As we all know, higher cost is not very appealing to customers in this economy. This upcoming meeting of minds will more than likely be geared at making these two items more customer friendly. If Microsoft can show their product is easy to quickly manage and fix, they can win back some angry Vista customers. If Intel can slip more vPro into customer sites without large cost increases, they will gain MSP adoption and happier customers.

With rumors floating around that Microsoft's new Office suite (yes, already) may be available for free, we thought it would be a good item of discussion. Microsoft has stated that a free version of their widely used collaboration suite will be available for use online. That's right, no software install required. As you can imagine, we tech skeptics went wild with theories on this. While cloud computing is a hot item right now there would certainly have to be a profit play for Microsoft here. Afterall, this isn't a non-profit open source group we're talking about. You can certainly expect that the free version will be missing some features that are key for businesses. Furthermore, it's doubtful business accounts will be eligible for the free version. You can also believe that there will be some ad revenue potential. I can imagine it now, the Office equivalent of Hotmail! Regardless of how the product is released it would be hard to picture it working in all browsers, other than Internet Explorer, at 100%. Take the Outlook Web Access platform with Exchange for example. While it will work in other browsers, it is not nearly as effective in it's crippled version. It's safe to say that business customers will still need to buy licenses (box or electronic) to receive the functionality expected. The better questions concerning Office 2010 might be, is another upgrade really needed?