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Timely Tips For Social Networking Safety

Social networking websites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Windows Live Spaces are services people can use to connect with others to share information like photos, videos, and personal messages.

As the popularity of these social sites grows, so do the risks of using them. Hackers, spammers, virus writers, identity thieves, and other criminals follow the traffic.

Read these tips to help protect yourself when you use social networks.

Be wary of links
Use caution when you click links that you receive in messages from your friends on your social website. Treat links in messages on these sites as you would links in email messages.

Post judiciously
Know what you’ve posted about yourself. A common way that hackers break into financial or other accounts is by clicking the “Forgot your password?” link on the account login page.

To break into your account, they search for the answers to your security questions, such as your birthday, home town, high school class, or mother’s middle name. If the site allows, make up your own password questions, and don’t draw them from material anyone could find with a quick search.

Watch out for a friend’s hacked email
Don’t trust that a message is really from who it says it’s from. Hackers can break into accounts and send messages that look like they’re from your friends, but aren’t. If you suspect that a message is fraudulent, use an alternate method to contact your friend to find out. This includes invitations to join new social networks. For more information, see Scammers exploit Facebook friendships.

Protect your address book
To avoid giving away email addresses of your friends, do not allow social networking services to scan your email address book.

When you join a new social network, you might receive an offer to enter your email address and password to find out if your contacts are on the network. The site might use this information to send email messages to everyone in your contact list or even everyone you’ve ever sent an email message to with that email address.

Don’t friend everyone
Be selective about who you accept as a friend on a social network. Identity thieves might create fake profiles in order to get information from you.

Choose your social network carefully. Evaluate the site that you plan to use and make sure you understand the privacy policy. Find out if the site monitors content that people post. You will be providing personal information to this website, so use the same criteria that you would to select a site where you enter your credit card.

Posting is permanent
Assume that everything you put on a social networking site is permanent. Even if you can delete your account, anyone on the Internet can easily print photos or text or save images and videos to a computer. And don’t forget, Google caches!

Avoid apps and games
Be careful about installing extras on your site. Many social networking sites allow you to download third-party applications that let you do more with your personal page. Criminals sometimes use these applications to steal your personal information.

To download and use third-party applications safely, take the same safety precautions that you take with any other program or file you download from the web.

Ghosts, Goblins And Failed Backups… Oh, My!

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

Welcome to October, fourth quarter, and Halloween!

The season of ghosts, ghouls and other scary creatures is the perfect time to talk about another frightening subject: The state of your backups!

First, the facts:

  • 6 percent of all PCs will suffer some sort of data loss each year.
  • Every week, 140,000 hard drives crash.
  • Simple drive recovery can cost more than $7,500.
  • More than 600,000 laptops are lost or stolen each year.

Scary Statistics
These are pretty scary numbers, particularly if you use your laptop for business. My experience has been that, while most business owners understand the importance of backing up their server, many forget about the data stored in email, on local PCs or laptops and flash drives.
The cost to replace a laptop pales in comparison to the effects the lost data can have on your business.

Whether it’s theft, a natural disaster, fire, flood, theft, or human error, any loss of important business data can be debilitating to your business if you’re not prepared for them.

Fortunately, there are three easy steps you can take to protect your business from the downtime and data loss that can result from a disastrous event.

Choose the right backup provider
Make sure that your backup system can provide you with both offsite and onsite backup, with an option to be back up and running within 24-48 hours. This is what our Experts Total Backup service is designed to do.

Keep in mind that many low-cost solutions require days or even weeks for full recovery of your files, due to the slowness of the Internet.

Your backup solution should not only protect your data, but should also give you a backup of your programs and network settings so your business operations can return to normal as quickly as possible.

Conduct a “fire drill”
You also want to be sure that you conduct a periodic “fire-drill” with your backup. Too many times, we see clients who religiously change tapes, but never check their content. When disaster strikes, we discover the tapes are blank. That’s why we’ve gotten rid of tape based backups.

Keep your backup current
Finally, whenever you add computers, new software, or new services to your network, be sure your backup solution reflects those changes. This will ensure that you are backing up everything you need.

Free Report
Business backups are complex, and require a professional solution. I’ve put together a free, 12 page report that covers all of these items – and more – that is your’s free for the asking. Just give me a call!

Local, Offsite Or Disaster Recovery: Backup Options Explained

By Tech Experts Staff
Many businesses have a lot of highly important data. A sudden, catastrophic loss of data has proven to put many businesses out of business within months of the data loss.

The extreme costs of both getting data back, if it’s even possible, and the expense of down time and lost business is an insurmountable obstacle to business continuity.

Thankfully, we have many options to proactively prevent data loss and in some cases, keep your business up and running when your original source of data is no longer accessible. With our Experts Total Backup service we’ve got your data covered.

Choosing the right backup option depends on the type of data your organization has, the amount of time that is acceptable to be without access to your data, and the amount of time you need to retain backups of your data.

For small to medium sized businesses, we offer a file based backup system that comes in several tiers.

The various tiers are based on not only the amount of data you have to backup but also on the type of data you need backed up.

For instance, if a business runs around the clock or routinely has files open at all hours, has SQL or other databases running, or the high likelihood of having files open during the backup jobs, we have a backup system that can backup these files, even though they are open, offsite to our secure offsite backup server.

So, what if your business can’t be down for any period of time, even if your building were to burn down?

For situations like this, we offer Backup and Disaster Recovery options.

A Backup and Disaster Recovery machine or BDR, is designed to take continuous snapshots or your server as well as upload this data to a cloud based server.

There are many benefits of having a BDR in place versus just having a standard backup job in place.
The first major advantage is that in the event of something catastrophic like a business being demolished (fire, flood, tornado) access to the server can be quickly restored via the images the BDR uploaded to the offsite server.

What this means is that even servers running applications, databases, etc. can still be completely accessible even if the original equipment was destroyed.

After the equipment has been replaced this image of the server that you have been using via our secure cloud environment can then be transferred to the new server.

This allows you to continue to function as a business, using your original data, while we work to setup a new server onsite for your business.

Planning on replacing an old server soon? We have backup solutions that can be included for onsite backups as well when a server is purchased through us.

Using Windows Server 2008, we can configure onsite image based backups that allow your servers image to be restored to another server in the event your server fails and cannot be used again.

If you need help sorting out the options, give us a call and we can go over your current backup solution to make sure you’re protected.

We’ll help you develop an appropriate backup solution to protect your data and ease your mind. Remember: Neglecting your backups is extremely risky!

Is Hosted Exchange A Good Idea For Your Business?

by Jeremy Miller, Technician
Email has become as important as any other utility to most businesses. So obviously, company owners will want to avoid interruptions at the lowest price possible.

For small to medium sized businesses, our Hosted Exchange service is the best option.

You only have to pay a flat per-user fee. This takes the hassle away from having a server on-site that has to be maintained and updated.

With Hosted Exchange, you don’t have to worry about your email data.

The facilities that house the Exchange server clusters are managed by Microsoft – the company that invented Exchange!

This can benefit you by having a very high uptime percentage, secure email backups, and synced data on all of your devices.

The cost of using Hosted Exchange compares favorably to having an onsite email server.

If your company has a relatively small number of email users, the savings can be as much as 90 percent.

However, even at 100 or more users, Hosted Exchange can reduce your costs by as much as 50 percent.

Hosted Exchange facilities always use third party backup support, which protects your email data from any foreseeable disaster.

This is great because, even if the facility was completely destroyed you will not experience a service interruption. This is possible because you will be able to use your email from the off-site backup location.

If your business begins to grow, your email will be able to expand to meet your needs. Using Hosted Exchange will minimize the impact on your internal network.

This will free up local bandwidth for server/client transactions. If you want to upgrade to a newer version or migrate to a new computer, the process will be easy and painless.

Exchange does more than just email. It is also a calendar and a contact list.

With Hosted Exchange all of your meetings can be shared with other members of your company. You’re also able to create contact lists that you can share with others.

Users will be able to access Exchange from almost any device, such as: Computers, smart phones, and tablets. Even though Exchange is a Microsoft product, users will be able to access it on a Mac.

The default Mail, iCal, and Address Book have had Exchange support since 2009.

However Microsoft developed Entourage to be very similar to Outlook.

This has a lot more functionality than the default mail apps, and was designed to interface with Exchange.

Also users can access their email from any machine that can use a web browser thanks to Outlook Web Access which is included with all Exchange mailboxes.With Outlook Web Access, you log into the Exchange system, and then use an interface that looks just like Outlook to manage your email.

If your company is email dependent, we’d love to talk to you about Hosted Exchange and the benefits to your business. Give the office a call at (734) 457-5001, or email us at info@MyTechExperts.com. And yes, that goes to our Exchange system!

Writing Compelling Online And Offline Marketing Content

Working in the world of B2B communications there are a lot of rules and regulations to follow, and it is often all very serious indeed, but that doesn’t mean that all your communications have to be boring.

There are a few guidelines to remember that can give potential customers important information without putting them to sleep in the process.

The first tip is to keep the message as brief as possible and just get to the point. A short, powerful idea that has been cleverly packaged will always be better than an inordinate amount of waffle.

The more efficient you can make the message, the more likely it is to be read and to have the effect you want it to have. It is also important to make your content valuable and one of a kind.

While your topic of choice may have already been the subject of countless articles, you need to provide a different angle that will make yours stand out from the crowd and draw in consumers.

Avoid Four-Letter Words
There are some four-letter words that have no place when it comes to the world of B2B – and we’re not talking about profanity.

These are simple everyday words that the really clever stopped making use of a long time ago. Some of the most offensive?

The likes of “can’t” and “busy” as used in sentences such as “We can’t do that” or “I’ll call you back when I’m not as busy.”
Customers come to your business because they believe that you will be able to give them what they are asking for.

Even if you genuinely cannot give them that, you should always try to send them to someone who can, as they will remember your helpful behavior.

Likewise, under no circumstances should you tell a customer you’re too busy to deal with them.

No client wants to feel that they are unimportant and unappreciated, and if you do that, chances are your client will find someone else who won’t make them feel that way.

How Much Content Is Enough?
One question faced by many B2B companies is when they have created enough content to be able to answer all the questions that a prospect might conceivably have at each and every stage of the buying cycle.

The question therefore is, how can a company go about determining that? It begins with understanding who their ideal buyers really are and the kinds of concerns and issues they will have.

Creating buyer personas can actually assist with this, as they are used quite commonly in order to create an ideal customer archetype based upon what you already know in regard to your current prospects and customer base.

You need to be able to get inside your buyers’ heads and have a solid understanding of what it is that makes them tick. To do this, talk to your customers and to the personnel at your company who regularly engage with them. It will be a lot easier to craft your message.

Medical Billing And Consulting Services Dramatically Improves Efficiency And Data Security

Cheryl Wilkinson and Ann Swartout started Medical Billing and Consulting Services Inc. (MBCSI) in 1988 with a single client. Now, the company provides specialized billing services for hundreds of clients as far away as Illinois, Florida and Wyoming.

MBCSI is a leader in its field, providing critical billing services for physicians and other medical specialists, and relies heavily on it’s network of eleven workstations and several servers.

“We use our computers to bill medical claims to insurances through clearinghouses and also generate hard copy claims for insurances that don’t have electronic capabilities,” explained Cheryl. “We also do patient statements for our clients.”

Unfortunately, MBCSI recently suffered a hard drive failure on one of their older servers, presenting them with a significant work stoppage situation.

“We contacted several other companies in the area,” explained Ann. “Tech Experts was the only one that immediately responded and put our minds at ease.”

MBCSI implemented a new Lenovo Think Server, running Windows Server 2008. The server also employs several extra measures of data protection, including RAID storage.

“They were able to recover all of our old files and install them on our new server, within a short period of time,” Cheryl said.

MBCSI took advantage of Experts Total Support, which provides complete technical support, anti-virus and monitoring services for a single low, monthly service fee.

“Once we signed on with them, they came into the office and went thru each computer and cleaned up the unnecessary files and malware on them,” Ann said. “This helps them run faster and more efficiently.”

Medical Billing also signed up for Experts Total Backup, which protects their critical business data with secure, encrypted off site storage.

“We have offsite backup now,” commented Ann. “That gives us tremendous peace of mind.”

Cheryl concluded, “If a terminal goes down or there is a glitch, they’re here immediately and we suffer much less down time. The fast service and friendly staff are quick to solve any problem.”

Got Compliance? Simplifying HIPAA And PCI Requirements

By Tech Experts Staff
Many of our clients from health care providers to any business that accepts credit cards via in house applications have compliance standards they must meet.

The health care industry in particular has to be compliant with HIPAA and possibly PCI as well. So, with compliance being such an important issue what are some ways businesses can be sure they are in compliance?

At Tech Experts we offer many different services that are designed to help your business be more compliant with the strict standards in place by HIPAA and PCI.

HIPAA was established in 1996 at a time when the health care industry was starting to move away from paper and rely on computerized documentation for day to day operations. With this new technology being used brought more security risks that needed to be addressed as a whole; this is what brought about HIPAA.

While new technology is great in improving productivity businesses have to learn to adapt to the new security risks that come into play when using these production increasing technologies.

One of the first services we offer to clients is our Email Hosting services. We have various offerings with email based off of POP email and Exchange email. For compliance we offer archiving services with both one year and ten year retention policies.

We also offer solutions that are encrypted so the traffic cannot be easily captured and read which protects the information you send by email.

The second service we offer to clients needing to meet compliance standards is our offsite backup system.

Our offsite backups send your important data over encrypted connections just like the email system protecting your data from theft as it travels from your location to the safety of our datacenters.

Depending on your ability to function in the event of a disaster/outage we also offer disaster recovery options to help your business continue to function should your primary server go down.

The third service we offer is managed services. With managed services you can be sure that your computer always has an up to date, high end, antivirus installed. We monitor the antivirus that is installed on all of our managed service clients workstations and servers to ensure they are safe and secure.

While an antivirus does not guarantee you will not get an infection (because no antivirus can guarantee this) having a good one does ensure that the likelihood of being infected is greatly reduced.

With our managed services offering, we also monitor failed login attempts to see if there are any brute force attacks targeting your network. This lets us quickly address a problem before it becomes a network breach. Patch management is another feature of managed services that helps with compliance.

Patch Management ensures that your computers are kept up to date with the latest security patches.

Our managed services plans also include remote service and support. We offer a robust remote support feature that allows us to troubleshoot and correct almost any issue remotely.

The ability to offer such a comprehensive remote support tool means that we can more quickly address issues you run into without having to actually come out to your location.

Another component we offer to make your business more compliant is our server and workstation packages. Any server we offer can be programmed to make your business more compliant.

From enforcing regular password changes, account lockout policies, to hardware or software restriction policies, our servers are sure to improve your current network configuration.

With all of our services bundled a business can vastly improve their security and become more compliant than they were previously.

If your curious how compliant your business is, give us a call. We can setup a security evaluation based on the requirements for your industry. We can then offer some suggestions to improve your network’s security and compliance.

Steps To Improve Your Virus Protection

by Jeremy Miller, Technician
Many people have asked lately how their computer might get infected by viruses. There are a large number of ways that a virus can get into your PC.

So you need to be properly protected so that in the event viruses find their way onto your system they will be eradicated.

The most important part of improving virus protection is starting with good reputable antivirus software. These usually do require that a little bit of money be spent, but the benefits far outweigh the cost.

There are a lot of antivirus software providers making it difficult to choose which antivirus to purchase.

When choosing an antivirus application, you want it to protect against known threats and irregular behavior or heuristics. Heuristics is a form of “artificial intelligence” which monitors patterns of behavior similar to malware activity.

You will always need to make sure that your antivirus software is up to date.

In some software, where it is okay to fall behind on an update, here and there to maintain functionality in some proprietary software, this is not true with your antivirus software.

Each update contains another list of viruses that have been found in the wild. Antivirus software usually costs a periodic fee that must be paid to continue your subscribed service.

This subscribed service is the updates to the antivirus software, and you will want to make sure that your subscription does not run out.

Once you have an antivirus program installed, you will want to schedule it to run at a time when your computer is on but not in use. This will keep your computer clean and not slow down your work.

Another serious measure of protection is keeping all applications on your computer up to date. Windows updates all the time to fix any new security vulnerabilities that become discovered.

All of the programs that you have installed on your computer must remain up to date as well. These applications update to improve the application and to fix security vulnerabilities.

If for some reason you have to keep an outdated version of software on a computer, then is is even more important to protect that software against viruses.

Even the best antivirus software cannot protect against all viruses. This is where backups are useful. You should back up your network constantly, and your workstation weekly.

Having backups on and off site is the best way to prevent costly disaster from striking your company. You will need to monitor your backups on a regular basis in order to confirm that the process is working properly.

Without testing, your backups may be corrupt and you would have no way of knowing.

We offer managed antivirus, backups and services such as patch management. This means that for a low monthly cost we can manage all of your computer updates and backups.

We can take the hassle out of which updates you should or should not install. We can also offer a cloud based backup solution to protect you from losing data that cannot be easily replaced.

Social Media For Your Business: Three Quick Tips

Social media is all the rage – we’ve written about it here, and you’re certainly hearing about it on the news and in your email.

Here are some quick tips to get the most out of three of the most popular services.

LinkedIn Can Help Grow Your Business
LinkedIn has more than 150 million registered users, which is a lot of opportunities for those who wish to use the professional social media site to help them grow their business.

The real worth of LinkedIn for businesses is to be able to connect on a one-to-one basis with other business professionals.

Many of the connections you make on the site can end up not only introducing you to partners and business influencers but potentially also referring your business to possible new customers.

Having a personal LinkedIn profile is often viewed as a digital business card or a form of online resume.

While using it as such is a good place to start, it can be taken much further to help you build a powerful presence online in order to help encourage more business opportunities and is an excellent way of both attracting and managing your business connections.

Using Twitter
Twitter is one of the fastest and best methods of amplifying the message, product and services of a business or an individual in all the social media available in the twenty-first century.
The first thing you need before launching your business on Twitter is a strategy.

Review your marketing and business goals, and don’t make this preliminary step too complicated.

Think about how your business can benefit from social media and how the industry that you are in is using it as a whole. The great majority of the time, social media will be able to fit into your digital marketing efforts.

Some things that you need to think about include what you intend to use Twitter for. Are you using it for customer research or for branding? Are you using it in order to reach a specific segment or target, for customer support, or just to raise awareness?

Another question you need to answer is whether you will be able to come up with enough relevant content to make it worthwhile.

Optimize Your Profile on Pinterest
Your B2B business may by now have created a presence on the popular and ever-growing Pinterest.

This site has achieved incredible growth, which is very hard to overlook when it comes to the potential for B2B marketers to engage with both existing and prospective clientele.
There are some ways in which you can optimize your profile on this site, however.

The About area is the keyword description of your page as it will appear in search results, should someone search for your page.

The image you use needs to be consistent with the profile graphic or avatar you use on your firm’s other social profiles for the purpose of easy recognition, though you also need to keep in mind how the image will look on your followers’ Pinterest streams.

The Social Linking area, if done correctly, can be a great source of content for your other profiles.

Decide whether you want to manually or automatically publish your pins to your Facebook or Twitter pages.

The Hide setting should be turned off so others can find your profile and pins when searching and search engines can index your activity.

Has Your Company’s Facebook Page Converted To Timeline? Here are Some Must Know Tips

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

If you follow social media at all (and you should be!) you know that the landscape changes almost on a daily basis. One place this is very evident is Facebook.

Facebook is constantly working to “improve” your experience and now they’ve done it again with Timeline – not only for our personal pages but for our business pages as well.

Many business owners fought the changes and waited until they were forced to accept the upgrade to Timeline. Now that it’s been switched over, they’re complaining that it’s cumbersome, unattractive and difficult to navigate.

But the Facebook juggernaut is unstoppable – the new layout is here to stay. So, here are a few tips to make the most out of your company’s Facebook page, and dealing with Timeline a little easier.

• Create a cover photo: this is a great way to use Facebook to further build brand recognition.

The options are virtually endless when it comes to this image as long as you remember that you can use a brand or logo but you can’t offer a coupon or discount (no “%” off sales or coupons or similar ploys), no contact information (that’s what your “About” section is for) and no calls to action (that’s what your status updates are for).

• You can get private messages from fans through your business page: this is a new feature and very useful. Before, if your fans wanted to send a message to you through Facebook, it had to be through your personal page.

Now they can contact you directly through your business page. This one may be a little difficult getting used to, so make sure you check those messages – you don’t want to alienate a potential customer!

• Highlighted post option: you can now select a post to be highlighted (this can be those discount, sales or calls to action that you can’t put in your cover image). Highlighted posts simply means your post can take up both sides of the page.

These are just a few of the useful changes that Facebook Timeline brings to your business page. Don’t worry – the new timeline may not fit well with your thoughts about change but it’s all in our best interest. Don’t panic and go with the flow.