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Microsoft unveils touch-oriented Windows 8 – Computerworld

Thursday, June 2nd, 2011

Microsoft unveils touch-oriented Windows 8 – Computerworld.

Apparently the latest version of ”code name” Windows 8 adopts a radically different, and phone and tablet friendly, interface. From the descriptions, this interface is much more of a departure than the Ribbon Bar that Microsoft introduced with Office 2007. It will be interesting to see if adopters prefer the new interface, or revert back to a traditional style, or if Microsoft automatically adjusts the style based upon form factor of the device and then lets you choose.

I must admit curiosity about how well the new system will fare on ARM based equipment as well. It makes perfect sense that Microsoft moves beyond Intel, since Intel doesn’t own the tablet or phone space like they do PCs and general servers.

I’m still curious though, whether you need, or even want, a full Windows 8 on your phone or tablet. As I’ve mentioned in this blog before, what really made the iPad work was that the engineers used Blue Ocean Strategy as part of their product design. Enhance some things and eliminate others to generate a new product for which there was no competition. I’m not sure that adapting Windows 8 will achieve the same goal. Chromebooks may, but that’s such a radical departure that I’m not sure it will work, either.

In the next year, the concepts will get a chance to prove themselves in the theater of the market. In the end, it’s the only venue that matters. At the same time, we here at Vectrocon will need to modify our services and service delivery methods to accomodate these new devices and the new ways our clients will use them.

Tags: form factor, it support for mobility, mobile operating systems, tablet, Windows 8
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Getting Your Website Noticed Without Breaking Rules

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

Computerworld published an article recently about the line between “white hat” and “black hat” search engine optimization techniques. Search engine optimization, as the article explains, is all about getting your website noticed by search engines, especially Google. If you know how to do this properly, your pages can come to the top of the search engine results pages and drive traffic to your site. However, if you do it incorrectly, either your site won’t show up near the top when someone searches on keywords of particular importance to your firm, or in a worst case scenario, you could find your firm actually penalized in the results, potentially pushing it out beyond where anyone would look.

Even though Vectrocon is a general Information Technology Support and Service Provider, we don’t offer website design or search engine optimization directly to our clients. For one thing, unless you perform the inappropriate “black hat” activities described in the article, the best search engine optimization techniques require that you provide solid content to your users. That is a job better suited to a marketing or public relations firm. Second, and continuing in that vein, your website should also be linked to social media outlets where organic conversations about your products and services take place. In addition to that, you really need to concentrate on educating your users and providing value. This can be aided by a marketing firm, but it also needs to stem directly from your firm’s own culture, marketing and sales areas, even if that’s just the owner. Everything else will appear to be “fake”.

We strongly advise our clients to review technologies that will support their marketing efforts and allow them to pull together to achieve an overall effect. In our case, we use this blog, some Youtube videos, posts to our Twitter account, our electronic newsletter (available via email and through our website) and a Facebook page to get our message out about technology, how it affects small business and how we can deploy and support it for our clients and potential clients. Our efforts have paid off with good results in the search rankings, and periodically we review our design and our postings to insure that they aid in our efforts. Further, we try to provide content that people will find interesting and helpful. If you’re not doing these things, you’re not effectively marketing — search engines or not.

Tags: advertising, marketing, SEO, technology support
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What the Amazon Cloud Outage Means for Small Business Technology

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

A lot has been made of Amazon’s recent cloud failure. Apparently many sites went down and stayed down for some time. There are apparently even unconfirmed reports that some data has been permanently lost. Some pundits claim that this means that cloud technology adoption will slow. Others say that these individuals are just pursuing their own agenda. Many people think that businesses will pay a lot more attention to their service level agreements than previously.

Vectrocon’s opinion on the matter is that much of the opinion depends upon how much of the hype surrounding cloud you believed in. Cloud computing, at its core, is Internet connected virtual machines or virtual services tied to a rental (subscription) model. Once you remove the magic from the cloud, you realize that cloud computing helps in many situations and has some great business value, but it isn’t a magic wand. The cloud is not heavenly. It’s not hell either.

So, here’s the rational small business person’s necessary understanding of the cloud. First, you need to know what you’re getting for what you pay. This is business 101,and you wouldn’t consider hiring a consultant or a cleaning service unless you understood what they were going to do for their fee, so why would you outsource your data and processing systems without doing the same. That shouldn’t even be considered sound business practice, but just plain common sense.

Second, just because you’ve rented a server, doesn’t mean that you can set it and forget it. If you can’t do that with infrastructure you own, why would you anticipate that you could do it with rented equipment? You need to be able to monitor and control the resources.

Third, trust, but verify. Make sure that the vendor either has a way to secure your data and an SLA to back it up, or that you have the means to backup the data yourself or can request such a backup from the service provider on an ad-hoc basis. Make sure that you have redundancy where it’s needed.

What the cloud champions say is often true, they have more equipment, better processes and more money to throw at key technology problems than you do as a small or medium business. However, it should also be noted that their environment makes your environment look quaint in terms of complexity and sheer size. Further, when things go wrong in these types of large scale operations, they tend to fail spectacularly. Much of the management of these systems is bleeding edge, and some of the scale involved to make cloud’s value proposition is almost unheard of. This isn’t spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt about the technology, it’s simple analysis.

In our own environment, we have almost everything in the cloud. We also have procedures in place to protect the data and we understand the risks presented by the service level agreements provided by our service providers. The key takeaway here should be that cloud is just another technology, and there hasn’t been any technology invented yet that doesn’t have drawbacks or require husbanding to work properly. Keep that in mind when you’re determining what cloud services to deploy and how to deploy them. As long as you understand the risks and rewards and balance them appropriately, neither positive or negative hype should distract you. If you need help in analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of cloud services in your particular environment, Vectrocon has experience in planning, deploying and maintaining cloud, on-premise and hybrid infrastructures.

Tags: choice, Cloud, reliability, technology limitations
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IT Security: Botnet Takedowns Continue

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

It appears that Microsoft and the Feds new method for discovering and taking down botnets continues to be effective. The Feds took out the Coreflood botnets command and control circuits, and Microsoft quickly sent an update to its April Anti-Malware tool to automatically remove infections.

Surprisingly, these tactics seem to be working better than anyone expected. The volume of spam sent after a takedown has remained low, and these botnets seem to be having a surprisingly hard time recovering from the counterattacks. Truth be told, we here at Vectrocon didn’t expect that these efforts would work for more than about a week, but in fact they seem to be surprisingly effective. They may not work long term, as this has yet to be seen, but they’re certainly proving effective in the short run and even into the mid term.

There are still plenty of problems that small businesses will have with security, but at least some threats are being handled without end users having to take direct measures. Of course, the only way to really protect yourself continues to be investing in some security technologies to give you some basic defensive tools, and educating your end users as to best security practices. Remember to automate patching of your system or to pay someone (like us) to do that for you. Use anti-virus software that is kept up to date. Consider using web security tools such as Websense. Provide some basic education, and generate acceptable use policies that are reasonable and to which staff will actually adhere. If you don’t have these policies, we can consult on reasonable security policies and provide training to your staff.

Tags: botnets, security, security practices, small business
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Network Support: Managed Service Offering

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

We’ve always been somewhat leery of the concept of managed services, where you pay a flat fee for service. We’ve seen a lot of our competitors get into a lot of trouble, either financially because they overpaid for tools, or financially because they failed their clients and lost business.

Because of our relationship with one of the largest technology distributors in the world, and because we have studied the model and let it evolve and determined how it could best be used to aid our clients, we have discovered a way that we can offer a lot of value to our clients for a fixed fee. The key lies in combining cloud services with our own sixteen years of learning how to deliver the highest quality service to our clients. For us, eliminating technology problems cost effectively always stood at the center of our universe.

We are still formulating the exact services, but we expect to offer complete service, including unlimited technical support via phone or remote access, automatic escalation to partner-level personnel as necessary, full service level agreements, automatic patching, 24×7 network monitoring, backup monitoring, anti-virus software and monitoring would be included. In addition to that, you will be able to include our hosted and web based solutions, such as complete Microsoft Exchange, Sharepoint and CRM. You will also be able to enter support requests via our website. Onsite work, project planning and execution and ad-hoc consulting will continue to be available on a pay as you go bais. Clients wishing to continue to use our existing fee structures will of course be permitted to do so. We expect, however, that many clients will find the new service offerings have more benefits at the same cost as our previous services, making them very attractive.

We will keep everyone informed as we continue to work through the details and offer services.

Tags: fixed fee it consulting, hosted services, msp, small business consulting
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Technology Support: What’s with the Ad Supported Applications?

Friday, April 15th, 2011

In almost every industry now, advertising supported technology has come to the fore. What does that mean? Google makes most of its money off of advertising revenue. You pay nothing, or a nominal fee, to access their services, such as search or the applications that they offer. In return, you are either subjected to advertising, or your data is mined to obtain critical insights into how your purchasing decisions might be made.

We’ve recently seen this while evaluating Practice Fusion, a startup that provides Electronic Health Records to doctors, especially those in small practices, for free in return for being allowed to advertise to its physician user base from within the program. The firm recently won another USD 23 million in funding from a collection of grade A venture capitalist firms. The founder / CEO and main public relations person claim that they make the majority of their money from advertising. The fine print of their legal document indicates that they may also use any data you enter, after redacting any personally identifiable information, for any reason they so desire.

There’s nothing wrong with these methods, and certainly free is appealing, especially for doctors that would otherwise forego the implementation of EHR technology, even with a major government refund in place. However, there are several caveats with this model. Although we’ve mentioned Practice Fusion, any advertising supported venue, including Google, Microsoft’s online properties, or any other vendor, can run into problems utilizing this model.

First, if advertisers find that their ads don’t sell their products, they will abandon the platform. That results in lower revenues, which in turn results in two outcomes. Either the firm goes broke, or the firm starts passing costs that it used to fund through advertising sales on to its subscribers. The other problem, is that in most cases, including Practice Fusion’s, there is nothing about how to get your data out of their data center if they decide to raise rates (which despite their marketing their usage agreement completely allows them to do) or if they fail outright. How do you retrieve your data? How much does it cost to do so, even if the firm allows it or even aids you? (We could find nothing in Practice Fusions agreement about this at all.)

As we’ve mentioned, we’re not trying to disparage these methods of revenue generation. We actually greatly admire much of what Practice Fusion has accomplished. However, there is no free lunch. We operate within a capitalist society, and that society exists to make money with the least amount of risk. Be very careful that you understand the advantages and disadvantages of adopting any system, regardless of the paradigm that is used to fund the system. We support all types of systems, and have clients that use both traditional and advertising based systems, but it is best to understand the advantages and disadvantages of both types of systems prior to engaging either one.

Tags: advantages and disadvantages, advertising based software, cloud computing, SAAS
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IT Support: Biggest Microsoft Patch Tuesday Ever!

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

Mark your calendars, as part of its regular update schedule, Microsoft intends to issue 17 patches covering a whopping 64 vulnerabilities! This will make the patch the largest ever, dwarfing last December’s vulnerability record and tying the October 2010 bulletin count. The patches cover a wide range of Microsoft software, so it looks as if just about anyone who uses any piece of Microsoft software will be affected.

As usual, you should test how the patches will affect your environment before deploying them, but by the same token, nce these patches are released, the bad guys will start figuring out what they fixed and will attempt to use those breaks. That gives you a window after which attacks will be “in the wild.”

9 of the bugs are critical, including 2 which are already known and 1 of which is being actively exploited. The remaining 8 security bulletins are ranked as important, which is the next step down.

We will be patching our Central New Jersey (Monmouth, Ocean, Somerset, Middlesex) IT Support clients and our South Florida (Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Miami) IT Support clients starting late nest week once we test the patches for compatibility.

Tags: IT Support, Managed Services, Patches, security
Posted in Network Support Patches, security, Vectrocon Services | Comments Off

Information Technology Threat Area Widens: Is Your Business Network at Risk?

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

Today, the US-CERT (United States Computer Emergency Response Team) issued bulletins covering 35 security holes in SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems, after a researcher publicly posted the vulnerabilities along with sample attack code. This may sound like complete jargon to you, and it is, but the bottom line is that these are command and control systems for factories. Almost all factories use automation to produce their goods, and the controls for these systems are specialized computers or software programs called SCADA. It was these systems that the Stuxnet worm targeted in what appears to be a cyber attack on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. This is really bad news for you.

If you’re a small business and don’t manufacture anything, you might be thinking that you don’t need to worry about this. But here’s the problem with that line of thinking: no one used to believe that anyone would target these systems. Now, it has been done successfully. So, what’s to stop the next group of attacks being used to take over printers, cell phones, televisions, or any of a host of other devices that we have integrated computers into? How about cars, retail scanning systems, even systems used to control heating, air conditioning or other building systems.

If you keep going, you can find that your business might be affected not by a direct attack, but by an indirect attack. Maybe the attack on your printer plants code that subsequently infects your computer when you print, and that in turn sends all of your login data to your Facebook page to some entity. Suddenly your firm has “liked” a whole bunch of sites that embarrass you. You’ve made comments on blogs that support ideas you detest. You defame your competition in public venues. Yikes!

Threats are becoming increasingly complex and less direct. One of the biggest hurdles to overcome, however, is that no technological solution we provide will address the weakest point in your defenses: people. Your employees, your vendors, your clients and maybe even yourself probably won’t care about security — until some attack causes you real harm in the form of lost productivity, reputation or money. The first key to proper security is education and an intolerance of apathy. If you hear the words, “I don’t care about the security”, you have a problem… When we consult about information technology security, we try to balance reasonable protection levels against whether our clients will actually be able to enforce the security measures with their staff and clients. If we propose and sell a technology to mitigate a particular problem, but everyone bypasses the security measures or stops using the core system altogether, the security situation not only might not have improved, it may have become worse.

Every business, large or small, should take security seriously. Every business should also determine what risks are acceptable and what are not, and develop policies that reflect those risks. Once there, then, and only then, do you determine if there are technologies to “enforce the rules”.

Tags: computer security, education, information technology security, SCADA, security, technology
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IT Consulting: Simple Customization for Your Facebook Fan Page

Friday, March 11th, 2011

Social Media - Vectrocon Helps Put it Together

Social - Physical or Virtual - Original Photo Mykl Roventine licensed via the Creative Commons

We have a person who comes to a networking group to which I also belong. He claims to be a social media expert, especially in the area of creating customized Facebook fan pages for businesses. This individual further claims that customized fan pages become “liked” by visitors twice as often as standard fan pages. Intrigued, I investigated how one would go about doing this.

The FBML App

I discovered a few interesting facts. First, you can create a customized fan page pretty easily if you already know something about website design. If not, any website designer can help you. The easiest way to do this is to use the FBML App. This app is provided by Facebook itself and is in the apps section of your page. There are a few rules. First, you are limited to a width of 520 pixels, so you will need to insure your design fits in that width. Second, you are allowed to use cascading style sheets and javascript within your page. Third, you can only have one page for each FBML box you create inside the App, but for a customized landing page, one page should suffice. This should be easy for you to do, and you should be able to either re-use your existing website as a basis for your custom landing page, or you should be able to create something new using any HTML editor.

The Facebook Platform API

What is perhaps more interesting, though, was Facebooks API. With it, your website developer or programmer can integrate all kinds of Facebook functionality within your website. You can have users who are logged on to Facebook receive customized content, or you can automatically have them redirect to Facebook to log in with their account and then redirect back to your site. There are a number of very interesting things that you could do. These features would especially suit businesses that have a “community” feel to them, such as camps or sporting facilities.

In short, if you want to build a customized fan page within your Facebook account, I’m not sure you need to hire a “guru” to do it. Any web designer should be able to help you out, or if you have even rudimentary skills you can do it for yourself. If you want to integrate Facebook functionality into your website, however, that does require someone with more skill and knowledge. You can view my quick, 45 minute job of creating the Customized Vectrocon Facebook Fan Page, if you’re interested.

Tags: consulting, Facebook Fan Page, FBML, Quick Tip, Social Marketing, Social Media
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Google Chrome: The Fastest and the Safest Browser?

Thursday, March 10th, 2011

Google's Chrome Browser Logo

Vectrocon supports information technology for many clients in a variety of industries, and although at one time most of them used Internet Explorer (r) (IE) as their primary web browser, that no longer holds true. We started recommending that clients use Firefox as their default browser when Microsoft ran into problems with security several years ago and failed to address those issues in a timely manner. Over the years, Firefox began to have some quality issues of its own, and Microsoft’s patching system began to even the score. On the Mac, Safari, the default browser, always did well as it was based on a similar engine as Firefox. When Google introduced Chrome, however, and ported it to both the PC and Mac platforms, a lot changed.

Chrome has been available for Windows PCs in a stable version since December 11, 2008, according to Wikipedia. Although a newcomer to the game, Google built the browser because it supports their vision of a web-centric information technology world. They want everyone to be committed to using the web because it drives their own revenue. Chrome quickly built up a reputation based on two things: speed and security.

In the two years since its first iteration, it has managed to escape unharmed at 3 consecutive Pwn2Own contests, according to Computerworld. No other browser has managed this. In this year’s Pwn2Own, no one even attempted to take on Chrome on the first day, although Safari fell in a reported 5 seconds and Internet Explorer fell to a combination of 3 exploits.

Although browsers continually leapfrog each other in terms of speed of execution and security, it is hard to argue with Chrome’s track record on both fronts. Even when a competitor manages to meet or exceed the bar set by Chrome, within a short span of time the crown shifts right back to Chrome.

One of the limitations still suffered by the browser, however, is that not all websites support it. Another limitation is that its minimal interface doesn’t provide some features available in other browsers, such as an RSS news reader. Google will open another application for RSS feeds. Ironically, on my Mac, that application is Safari.

Currently, I personally use Chrome as my default browser on my Mac. However, I need Safari to view my RSS feeds and I have at least one website that doesn’t work with Safari or Chrome, so I need to use Firefox to do work there. At least several times a month I have three web browsers open on my computer – at the same time. Chrome is fastest and safest, Safari provides functionality not available in Chrome, and Firefox would be left out in the cold, except that sometimes neither of the other two browsers are supported.

So, at the moment, I would vote for Chrome as the best browser for general use, but I can’t say that it works the best for everyone or that it fits the bill all the time. One of its major advantages (simplicity of interface and elegance of design) also proves to be a hindrance (it can’t do everything I need). I think most small businesses will find the same holds true for Chrome. Unfortunately, for most of us it can’t be your only browser. We support Chrome, and look forward to continued improvements, but on its current trajectory it will never become the only browser we use.

Tags: Chrome, security, speed, web browser comparison, web browsing
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