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Looking For Good Career Advice? Avoid These Stale Clichés

Books, blogs, and motivational gurus are full of career advice for beginners and veterans alike. Much of it can be useful, but you’ve got to be careful to separate the good from the misguided and obsolete.

Don’t blindly follow these “words of wisdom” without a healthy dose of skepticism:

“Any job is better than no job.”
Working at a job you hate can sap your morale and make any change harder to accomplish.

You probably won’t be motivated to do good work, and if you quit out of frustration, you could be labeled an undependable job-hopper.

No job is fun all the time, but you’ll generally do better at a job you can find some enjoyment in, even if that takes longer to find.

“Follow your passion.”
On the other hand, don’t wait forever for your dream job to present itself.

You need to know what you’re good at, and what you like doing, but chances are you can do well in a job that satisfies less than 100 percent of your ambitions.

You don’t want to give up worthwhile career opportunities because they don’t fit with an unrealistic dream of success.

“You need an advanced degree to get anywhere.”
Education is always a good thing, but without a clear purpose, you could waste years and thousands of dollars on studies that don’t necessarily translate to career success.

Decide on what you want to learn, be clear on how it will help you, and make sure the investment will really pay off in terms of increased opportunities and career satisfaction.

“Never quit a job.”
You shouldn’t jump ship at the first sign of trouble, but staying at a dead-end job with no hope of advancement and little chance of learning anything doesn’t help your career.

Look for opportunities to improve your situation wherever you’re at, but keep an eye on the job market so you’re never trapped.

“The one thing you need to do is …”
Be wary of any advice that offers a quick fix. Managing a career is complicated. You don’t know what’s coming up, and you won’t always know the right decision to make. You’ll make mistakes and encounter bad luck.

Commit to learning and moving forward, and don’t waste time following short-lived trends or depending on gimmicks to land your dream job.

How To Beat Job Burnout

If you are finding it more and more difficult to cope with the demands of your job in addition to the rest of your life, you are definitely not alone. More and more people are putting in additional hours at work or being on call even when they should be at home relaxing.

The good news is there are ways to make your daily routine a little more balanced. One of the best is to actually build downtime into your schedule. As you plan your week you should make a point of including time with friends and family as well as activities that will allow you to recharge such as a sport of some kind.

Being proactive about scheduling can be very helpful and also prevent free time from being wasted. Another good idea is to drop activities that are sapping your energy or time, including online activities. Making time for exercise can also assist you with becoming more alert and boosting your concentration and overall energy level.

Why Virtualization Is A Good Idea For Your Small Business

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

Server virtualization is the partitioning of a physical server into smaller virtual servers to help maximize your server resources.

In server virtualization, software is used to divide the physical server into multiple virtual environments, called virtual or private servers. This is in contrast to dedicating one server to a single application or task.

Server virtualization provides a small business with almost unlimited storage space. Let’s look at some of the ways that server virtualization could benefit your small business.

Efficiency
Virtualization maximizes server space, which reduces the number of servers needed to store important company data.

Since multiple virtual servers reside on a single physical server, your infrastructure will require less space, saving occupancy costs.

Economy
Virtualization will cut down on your energy consumption, which will lower your monthly bill. Because you’ll need fewer servers, you’ll save on hardware costs, as well.

For a small-business owner, these savings can mean a lot in the long run, especially if energy costs are high.

Disaster Recovery
Fires, theft and natural disasters happen, often without warning.

What would happen to your business if all of your important files were stored on in-house servers that got destroyed in a tornado or fire?

With virtualization, that becomes less of a worry, especially if you conduct regular checks to ensure that your data is being properly backed up.

It is equally important that you take steps to ensure the data can be recovered if necessary and that when recovered, the data is usable.

Virtualization cuts down on the risk that an employee or thief could walk off with important company files, something that can happen if you back up company files on external hard drives.

Business Continuity
Unlike disaster recovery, business continuity is about quickly recovering from things like power outages and server crashes.

These two common occurrences could cost a small-business owner a lot of money depending on how long employees remained idle waiting for power to be restored or a server to be repaired.

With a virtualized server environment, server images are often backed up to the cloud – where they can be enabled in real time and act as a replacement server until resources are restored.

Virtual Desktop
This is a growing trend in the business world. Also known as client virtualization, desktop virtualization separates the PC desktop environment from the physical machine and operates in the cloud.

With virtual desktop infrastructure, employees can access the company network from their laptops, tablets or smart devices.

Virtualization has worked well for large enterprises for a number of years, and now the technology is affordable for smaller businesses.

Choosing virtualization for your company is no small matter. You’ll want to make sure you use an experienced, trusted IT partner to make sure your project goes smoothly.

The Benefits Of VoIP Over Traditional Phone Service

by Jeremy Miller, Technician
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is the general term used for transmitting two-way voice communication over a network.

This can work on any network, whether it be at home or work, connected to the Internet. VoIP can also be used for internal communications and do not necessarily need to be transmitted out to the Internet.

Plain old telephone system (POTS) is the traditional phone service that everyone is used to, and it is commonly known as a home phone.

This system is designed to run on dedicated electronic circuits and is transmitted using analog signals where VoIP uses digital.

There are many reasons that you should use VoIP over POTS many of which include cost and expansion. Where ever you have a network connection, VoIP can be implemented. POTS often are much more costly.

As I said before POTS requires a dedicated circuit to transmit on. This means every time you add a new phone you would have to run a phone line and a network drop.

POTS can become quite expensive for an office building if you have to run phone lines to each person’s office.

In the event of expansion POTS will require costly hardware upgrades and provisioning of new lines. VoIP will only require more bandwidth and possibly software upgrades which are generally inexpensive and very easy to do.

There is much more competition in the VoIP market. Where POTS may have a few providers to choose from in your area, VoIP will have hundreds to choose from on the Internet.

When using VoIP you have control over the traffic of the phone calls as well. This makes it easy to manage, record, and maintain all phone calls.

Many of the features such as call waiting, conference calling, music on hold, multiple extensions and voice mailboxes are all free with VoIP. These features have always come at a premium when using POTS.

VoIP does not limit you to what you can transmit over its call. For instance you can make a video call or a voice call using VoIP. While in your call you can send over an attachment which is quite similar to email.

There are downsides to using VoIP as well, but most of them can be mitigated. The first is unpredictable quality of service. You may not always get great sound or video quality.

This is usually dictated by the available bandwidth. If you notice your quality is not as good as you like, then you may need to upgrade your Internet speed or you network equipment.

VoIP may not always get you to the correct 911 responder in the event of an emergency. They are not centralized like POTS. The traffic could be routed around the world.

Since VoIP relies on the Internet and the Internet relies on electricity, you will lose your VoIP service if either Internet or electricity goes down.

This can be avoided by having a redundant Internet connection and battery backups for your network equipment.

You can also install an IP based private automatic branch exchange (PABX) which will allow you to integrate your POTS with VoIP so you can take advantage of VoIP and not lose the benefits of POTS.

If you are looking into VoIP or have any questions we would be happy to help.

Choosing The Best Option To Back Up Your Data

by Michael Menor, Network Technician
We highly recommend that all computer users regularly back up their data in order to prevent losing information in the case of a disk failure.

We recommend at the very least backing up files that are frequently changed. A basic backup strategy involves copying important files to a location separate from your hard drive.

Having more than one copy of important data is insurance against the loss of that data in an event such as a hard drive or system failure.

To make your backup strategy more complete, you should try a trial restore of your backup so you will be comfortable enough with the process to use it before you experience the loss of data.

Flash drives that plug into a USB port are a convenient technology for backups. They do not generally require any extra software and are very portable and they can be reused many times.

Flash Drive
A flash drive can serve as an external repository for important data as a protection against an event such as the failure of your hard disk.

However, a single flash drive does not have the storage capacity to backup an entire hard disk or file system, and they tend be more expensive than other storage methods for the same amount of data.

Cloud Storage
You can access your data from any computer or mobile device with an Internet connection and you don’t have to keep track of any extra hardware or external storage media.

There are many providers that offer free online storage. A few popular ones are Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft SkyDrive.

Many of these are cross-platform applications that enable you to access whatever data you have stored as though it were stored in a folder on your computer’s hard drive.

CDs/DVDs/Blu-ray discs
CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs are also an option for backing up data if you have an internal or external drive that can write to one or all formats:

  • CDs: 750 MB
  • DVDs: 4.5 GB (single layer) or 8.7 GB (double layer)
  • Blu-ray: 25-100 GB

CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs are among your cheapest backup options (per gigabyte), and they are also among the most durable (no moving parts to wear out or metal parts to rust).

However, while it is technically possible to back up your entire system to CDs, DVDs, or Blu-ray discs by spanning multiple discs, it would be a time-consuming process that would require many discs.

External Hard Drives
An external hard drive is often the same type of hard drive as found inside most computers, only in a stand-alone enclosure with a USB or other data port that is powered by your computer or a separate wall adaptor.

As such, it is possible to purchase an external hard drive that is as large or larger than your computer’s internal hard drive, allowing you to backup your entire system to a drive that you can separate from your computer, carry with you to transfer your files, or set aside as a backup.

Most external hard drives have moving parts, however, making them more prone to wear and damage due to drops or vibration than some other backup options.

Also, some external hard drives do not operate cross-platform, which means that if your drive is formatted for use with Mac OS X, it may not be recognized by a Windows computer (or vice-versa).

External hard drives are available in sizes ranging from 100 gigabytes to many terabytes, and some are small enough to carry in a purse.

However, in whatever size you choose, external hard drives are the fastest and most versatile way to back up large amounts of data.

Outlook.com Tips And Tricks

Ever since Microsoft switched Hotmail to Outlook some users have had difficulty adjusting to the changes even though it is essentially still the same, and attaching photos and files is more simple than ever before.

There is however some simple tips for those who have found the changeover confusing.

The important thing to remember is that your email address has not changed and continues to end with hotmail.com. You can even add an alias account via http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/outlook/add-alias-account.

The alias makes use of the same contact list, settings and inbox as your primary email address.

Those who don’t like the default blue color scheme can also change it to suit simply by selecting the small ‘cog’ icon that can be found in the right hand corner of the Outlook window and selecting from the 18 available color schemes.

If you are writing an email that has turned out to be almost novel size but don’t have time to finish, just tap the button marked “Save Draft” on the colored Outlook menu bar.

This will save a copy to your Drafts folder and allow you to go back, finish and send it at a later time.

Blog Your Way To Success

Blogging is nothing new these days, but it’s still a powerful tool for promoting yourself, your ideas, and your personal brand.

Blogs are easy to set up, but good blogs can be challenging to maintain.

Keep these tips in mind to create a blog that will make a mark on the Internet:

Stick to a clear theme
Select a broad topic to concentrate on. If your blog seems too scattered, people won’t feel any compelling reason to read it regularly.

Know your audience
Think about who you’re trying to attract. What are they interested in? What are their problems? What do they need?

Address these questions and you’ll be able to create content that appeals to the readers you want.

Write powerful headlines
The first thing your readers will see when they visit your blog is the headline of your latest story. Give it some excitement and emphasis with action verbs and colorful language so they know what your item is about, and want to read it right away.

Engage with your readers
Don’t let comments sit there. Respond with a thank-you, more information, or to correct misinformation.

Avoid fights, but make your points clearly and respectfully so your audience knows you’re paying attention.

Keep at it
Many blogs start strong but then languish because their founders lose interest.

Remember that this is a long-term effort. If you’re not getting the response you want, try tweaking your blog, but don’t give up too soon.

Tech Support Calling? It’s Probably A Scam Or Hacker

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

For business computer users, the threat of a security breach is a constant worry. The thing is, many systems are secure enough from outside attacks, and many scammers know this.

As a result, scammers have switched tactics and have taken to pretending to be Windows technicians, hoping to get users to give up their credit card information.

This isn’t a new scam. Despite news reports and emailed reminders, some people still fall for the ruse.

Social engineering
These social engineering tricks generally follow the same formula: A person calls you pretending to be from the Windows technical team at Microsoft.

The scammer usually tells you that you need to renew your software protection licenses to keep your computer running.

Most of the time, these scammers spread the conversation out over a number of phone calls and emails, the goal being to gain the trust of the user.

Once trust is established, or the user seems interested enough, the crook will offer a seeming sweet deal: They offer a service that makes your computer run like new, usually for a reasonable price.

The scammer will then use remote PC support software to show you ‘problems’ your computer is having.

They will usually show you the Windows Event Viewer – a part of the OS that shows errors, usually harmless, that your computer has generated.

The scammer will then convince the user that these errors are harmful, and if you have paid, they will make it look like they are cleaning your computer.

If you give them your credit card number, you will likely see ridiculous charges, or even have people trying to access your accounts.

What’s being done?
Governments are aware of this increasingly common trick, and some organizations, like the FTC, have taken measures to shut down scammers.

What can we do?
While action is being taken, these scammers are working hard to steal your credit card and other personal information. To ensure you don’t fall prey to this trickery, these five tips should help you identify when an attempted scam is at play:

  • Microsoft doesn’t call people.
  • Windows Event Manager is a log of errors for ALL programs.
  • Microsoft employees will never ask for your passwords.
  • Most of these scammers operate out of call centers in India, but bill from the US.
  • Microsoft employees won’t usually ask you to install software that’s not made by Microsoft.

As a rule of thumb: If you get an unsolicited call about your computers and IT security, it’s likely not genuine. If these criminals provide you with a website, do a quick Google search to see if there have been any scam reports.

If you’re concerned your credit card or other information may have been compromised, please call us right away for a complimentary security assessment.

The Importance Of Planning Your Computer Upgrades

by Jeremy Miller, Technician
When considering upgrades to your computer or network, planning is a very important part of the process. Planning can save you a lot of wasted time and money.

When planning your upgrades you will want to think about what all is involved and attempt to address any issues prior to installation to prevent down time as much as possible.

First you will need to understand what you need to upgrade. Can you upgrade your current setup or will you have to purchase entirely new equipment to upgrade? There are many components of an upgrade that may not work together with older technology.

You can find this a lot if you upgrade to a new workstation and some of your software is not compatible with the new operating system on the computer.

You will also find that older hardware sometimes cannot be upgraded with new hardware without replacing the motherboards or the whole computer.

Hardware and software both have limits on how much other software and hardware that they support.

A good example of this is: If you bought a good computer about 8 years ago the maximum amount of RAM you could use was about 4 gigabytes. It is now common to have 4 gigabytes to be the minimum amount of RAM installed.

Some software out there will not even run well unless it is over 4 gigabytes of RAM. The old computer cannot be upgraded with more RAM so you would need to purchase a new computer in order to get more RAM.

If you were to buy the RAM to upgrade the computer you may have just wasted time and money. This is why planning is so important.

If the upgrade is for an organization or business you may have purchased RAM for many workstations. A lot of time the RAM would be incompatible with a newer computer as well.

When planning for any type of computer or network upgrade you will want to look at how long you have already had your existing setup.

You can expect to get about 5 years out of any device whether it is a desktop, laptop, printer or other device. If your equipment is that old or older it is usually better to replace the equipment.

There are many reasons for upgrading versus updating. The biggest reason is that it is time to replace. Usually five years after you purchase your computer there is software and hardware that will make it very easy to upgrade.

If you wait much longer then your existing equipment will not be easily upgraded to the newer computers.

When you plan to upgrade your computers you can save money by getting deals or specials. This is because when you plan, you know what you will need and you can wait for sales or promotions.

If you do not plan then more than likely you will be upgrading when your computers start causing issues. This is not a good practice. You will end up having more down time due to low-performing computers and the time it will take to get the faulty computers fixed or replaced can easily end up costing more than the cost of replacing your workstations regularly.

We are always consulting clients and helping with upgrades and migrations, if you have any questions feel free to contact us. We are more than happy to help you with any sort of computer or network upgrades.

Why Third-Party Monitoring And Managed Services?

As technology advance and organizations face increasing demands for efficiency in their business, their IT infrastructures have become increasingly complex. Applications are far more interdependent than ever before, and their business tools, whether hardware or software, are making up a diverse web of systems from a wide range of vendors.

The challenges of dealing with this complexity are something that businesses have to deal with on a daily basis. In a recent study, nearly 50% of global business leaders have called “increased reliance on technology” the No. 1 risk to their organizations. Another 37% said the “business complexity of the organization” is their top risk.

All the same, businesses need to deliver high performance and high availability, typically without accompanying increase in budgets
to accomplish these goals.

So how can companies cope with the dual challenges of managing an increasingly complex infrastructure, while remaining focused on achieving business goals and delivering high quality products and services to their clients?

Organizations are increasingly turning to third party providers that delivers advanced monitoring and resolution services for your IT assets.

If you work with a knowledgeable vendor —one that is familiar with your infrastructure — there are big advantages to taking this approach, including:

  • Lower total cost of ownership
  • Higher availability of applications
  • Reduced downtime, (planned or unplanned)
  • Reduced workload on your own people to deal with IT issues
  • Improved application performance
  • Ability to proactively monitor and thereby mitigating issues as they arise, as opposed to after it’s too late

An advanced monitoring and resolution service should consist of 24/7 secure remote monitoring and resolution delivered by skilled engineers using proven practices.

The service should offer rigorous security certifications to ensure remote experts safely deliver proactive monitoring and administration of internal applications and hardware systems.

Don’t think of it simply as an outsourcing solution. Rather, think of it as a team of experts supplementing your own team, providing a number of products and solutions that it would be next to impossible to maintain in-house.

Because of the complexity of today’s systems, it is often difficult to identify exactly where and why systems fail. This can result in dissatisfied customers and less productive workers.

These problems can be severe enough to put the organization at risk. With proactive monitoring and advanced support, however, the organization will be made aware when (and why) vulnerabilities occur.

An advanced monitoring service means looking after performance or availability of all your critical systems and applications. This monitoring can extend through your entire infrastructure — applications, databases, servers, storage, networks and backup. Problems, can be addressed using best practices for incident, change and problem management.

As a client, you can choose to deploy the services according to your own needs, from full remote services to full onsite solutions or some combination.

The process of monitoring and remediating problems within your IT, you will learn a lot about your risks and vulnerabilities. Are there peak usage times that are impacting application slowing down the performance of mission-critical applications? The key is to continuously improve performance and availability.

You should meet regularly with your professional services team to review processes and set strategies for continual performance improvement. You should also have a plan that includes regular hardware and software health checks.

Your company gets the revenue as well as interacts with your customers through your applications. When performance slows down, the entire business suffers and is put at risk for lost revenues, lost profits, lost customers and general damage to your brand.

Advanced monitoring and resolution services lets you keep track of application performance at all times. Monitoring agents create alerts when systems or applications are under-performing, so you can fix issues before they impact the company further.

End-user monitoring takes the service a step further, whereby you can collect, process and present details — even going so far as to track user requests and follow them through to resolutions.

You can collect information on the length of time it takes to complete a business transaction and the length of time it takes to search, select and pay for a specific product. You can easily see how you can improve revenue and profits.

Predictive incident management diagnostics lets your vendor partner identify issues with configurations and performance before they become full-scale problems.

For example, advanced monitoring lets a service provider leverage complex algorithmic models and thereby identify potential issues with individual transactions within the database.

Advanced monitoring and resolution delivers significant improvements in IT support. You can measure the performance in meeting service requests, including trends on how long it takes for repairs to be performed, response by incident type, and reporting and measure performance against standards on all systems, including backup, emergency storage and system uptime.

A third-party supplier will have access to tools, methodologies and best practices your organization may not even be aware of.

Advanced monitoring and resolution is what they do every day, so your organization is always taking advantage of the experience the vendor has gained from working with other businesses, as well as the latest in diagnostic and recovery tools.

They often employ thorough diagnostic tool sets that cover all your systems. By using these tools, they are able to identify and qualify new incidents, automatically compare new incidents with a knowledge base of past incidents, and use the past experiences as the basis to quickly and effectively resolve issues.

Clearly you will want advanced monitoring and resolution to deliver 24/7 support for all your systems, databases and mission-critical applications. But some vendors can also offer more specialized services, such as end-user monitoring; firewall and VPN management; continuous risk assessment application management; and intrusion detection systems to mention but a few.

Because IT has grown in complexity, it is difficult and costly to hire and retain all the in-house expertise required to manage everything.

The other problem comes with internal politics, often resulting in finger-pointing than actual problem solving. An outside vendor gives you not only access to a team of service professionals with deep expertise. They are focused on fixing your problems, and not assigning blame.