Thursday, October 28, 2010

Facebook 102 – Getting More Readers – Technique 1

So here begins Facebook 102, you’ve built a Facebook page, but how do you increase the people that are looking at you?  This link Facebook Business Page Optimization provides one of the techniques for doing exactly that.  There is also a link to the complete podcast “Getting Your Business in the Facebook Game” the techniques. 

Related resources:

White Paper - Social Networking Guide by CMIT Solutions - Find it here at the 2010 Small Business Webinar Resources page of the CMIT Solutions Stamford site.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Do I need a Facebook presence and a Website these days?

Just finished reading a quick article by Raquel Richardson, that is worth a quick read Facebook vs. Website.  I was sitting here wondering what the opinion was these days as to whether you need both (yes).  I am working on getting my head around all this social media stuff and I think I’m getting somewhere.  So my website needs to be my corporate brochure where people can find out more in depth information about my company.  And Facebook will contain the content that is more current, more like a current events and happening section.  Although I could post that kind of stuff on my webpage, its better to do it in Facebook, since that is a ready built community of “eyeballs” and so therefore today  I will likely get more visibility and “hits” through Facebook.  Hope my ah-hah moments helps you to have one too.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

A Day in the Life of a Malware Hunter

With all the emails that come into my Inbox, I don’t usually have time to read all of them (even some?), but this week I took a moment to read the latest newsletter because the headline above caught my eye.  It was surprising well done and if you ever wondered what goes into making a good PC security product, it is worth a few minutes to read the article from the makers of the Anti-Virus-Malware-Spyware protection product we have favored for the last 2 years VIPER from Sunbelt Technologies. Click here for the article http://www.sunbeltchannelnews.com/?id=30.

I can’t stress enough the importance of running good “Protection” software.  We see every week the cost to small business to remove viruses and repairing the damage they often cause.  A typical removal/repair job starts at $200 and we are lately see the variety that can’t be removed and therefore the PC needs to be reformatted and reconfigured (a job that averages $1,000 when you really add it all together). 

Installing current (no more than 2 years old) “Protection” software isn’t enough since many viruses disable your protection software (nice huh?), your “definitions” need to be up to date (within 2 days at the absolute longest) and the software needs to be monitored to make sure some malicious code hasn’t disabled it.  This is why more and more companies we talk with are going with one of our monthly services; for just a few dollars more you get the monitoring aspects and unlimited “break/fix” related to the protection software.

Malicious code is more and more often coming from PDFs (we removed the same virus three time in a week that we traced back to a PDF on MSN.COM) and embedded in web traffic from social networking, travel, news and shopping sites.  Your “desktop” protection software can’t stop it, so when we see this happening more and more often we are now added a “Web Traffic” security service to the environment.  This really does the trick and has several other benefits.

Drop me an email or a comment if you have a question or want to know more.

Friday, October 8, 2010

SharePoint

What is SharePoint?
Microsoft SharePoint is a family of software products developed by Microsoft for collaboration, file sharing and web publishing.  One purpose is that it can be used for, in small business, is as a company intranet or internal portal.  I like to think of it as a way to visualize the data that is inside of department/company folders.  One of the triggers I ask clients is whether they are finding they are spending a lot of time trying to find documents.
Here is a good introductory article on the CMIT Solutions blog that is worth reading too to understand SharePoint.
Since one of the key aspects here is visualization, you can understand more about SharePoint is and what is can do from the following videos.
1. Good Introductory Video explaining what SharePoint it is.

2. See a sample SharePoint site.  This video is geared toward end-users that explains the structure/concepts of a SharePoint site.
3. This video shows how projects can be supported by SharePoint in a company.  Features that are highlighted are: Document management, document search, team calendar, contact management
4. Overview of a sample SharePoint team site and some end-user  basics. Features covered are: announcements, calendar, document management, document templates.
5. Design example for easy filtering of multiple “items” that have a common attribute. This video shows a great design for displaying “things” that may be tagged with “attributes”.  In this example a particular company is selected and then only the tasks and documents related to that company are shown on the screen; the video then goes on to show a SharePoint Developer how to do that.