Hampton Roads Communication Technologies | Phone, Data and Internet Solutions for Small Business, Corporate, and Executive Offices

Office 365 for SOHO (Part 1)

Eric — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 22:22:47 +0000

What is Office 365? Office 365 is Microsoft’s new software plus hosted services (read: cloud) subscription offering for businesses that are looking for advanced features without breaking the bank and buying dedicated servers have these products in house. Office 365 is offered in a few different plans that include a suite of products and services or you can get these products and services a la carte.

For this blog I’m going to focus on one feature in particular included in the Office 365 Professional Plan ($6 per month per user) that really makes sense for the Small Office / Home Office (SOHO) user: Microsoft Exchange Online.

Microsoft Exchange Online is basically Microsoft Exchange Server hosted by Microsoft in the cloud. Exchange Server, whether it’s running on your server or on Microsoft’s, enables Outlook users with some great advanced features that would not otherwise be obtainable in small offices with just a few people.

Many of us use Outlook to manage our business and personal lives and it has been the standard in business communications for a long time because it packs such a great feature set. If you don’t own or work for a big company, you may not know about some of the features enabled when Outlook connects to its server counterpart. I’m going to highlight 2 features that are big ones for the SOHO user but first let’s talk about the issues of the past.

Challenges for the small office Outlook lover:

You love Outlook when you’re in the office and you keep everything perfectly organized in appropriate folders, but when you’re out of the office and need access to this information you are out of luck.
If you try and use your webmail for organizing mail, keeping an address book, or keeping your calendar appointments, you are sorely disappointed at the feature set and long for what Outlook has to offer.
When you reply to an e-mail in the office and need to see what your reply was while out of the office you are out of luck; that message is in Outlook, but not in your webmail.
Inverse of number 3, you are out of the office and reply to an important message and later you are in the office searching for what you said and it’s not there.
When you setup to receive e-mail on your smart phone you once again have a third place where e-mail resides that may or may not reside in the other 2 locations, Outlook and webmail.
You want to set an automatic reply when you’re on vacation but the feature is grayed out on the menu in Outlook.

Solution: Microsoft Exchange Online

When Outlook is connected to Exchange it is no longer the home base for your mail, calendar, tasks, and address book like it used to be. What you see in Outlook is an exact copy of what is stored in Exchange and Microsoft is hosting it for you in the cloud. This means that when you move things, reply to mail, set a calendar appointment, create a task, these things are directly synchronized to Exchange.

You may have more than one computer with Outlook on it such as the computer in your office and the laptop you use on the road. All of these computers with Outlook will stay up-to-date with the latest information.

Also included in Office 365 is the Outlook Web App. This is the web-based interface that looks and feels much like Outlook. It is 10 times better than the webmail you may have now.

The reason you could never get an Out-of-Office response to work is because the server is the one to respond, not your Outlook. If your computer running Outlook was closed or shut down no response would ever get generated. This feature becomes available when Outlook is connected to Exchange and once you have it you’ll never know what you did without it.

Since Microsoft Exchange has the lion’s share of the e-mail server market all major smart phone companies include a way to connect to it. This includes iPhone, Android, & BlackBerry and the always up-to-date information you now enjoy within Outlook happens on your phone as well.

Office 365 for the small office is such a great value at $6 per month per user that even without all the other features (which I’ll write about in future blogs) is worth the price of admission.

Posted by Eric O. Schueler, A+, MCP, MCSE, MCTS, CSSA, ACSP. Eric is the Senior V.P. of Information Technology at HRCT. He has been in the business of providing IT and consulting for small and medium business for more than 15 years.

For more information and to ask questions, click here to contact Eric Schueler.

Hampton Roads Communication Technologies (HRCT) provides quality business telecommunications solutions, like Business Telephone Systems to companies and organizations throughout the Hampton Roads Virginia cities of Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Suffolk, Newport News and Hampton, north into Williamsburg and south into the Outer Banks of North Carolina. HRCT keeps your company connected. Call today 757-399-3350.

Voicemail to E-mail

Eric — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:19:44 +0000

In my last blog I pointed out that technology has spoiled us and here’s another spoiler that you’ll love.

You’re out of the office and someone leaves you a voicemail message. What happens? You may not know anything about that message until you get back to the office. That may mean missing out on an opportunity – lost business – bummer right? So what can be done to eliminate that scenario?

Voicemail to e-mail is certainly a step in the right direction. As soon as your customer finishes leaving you a message, your voicemail system sends you an e-mail with the voicemail message attached. Now you can receive that voicemail to e-mail message on your smart phone, your home computer, your office computer – wherever you want to receive it, and when you open the attachment, you will be hearing the voicemail message that your customer just left you; it’s just like listening to an mp3 music file. Once you listen to the message you can potentially call the customer (their telephone number will be part of the subject line of your e-mail) or sometimes forwarding that message to someone else via e-mail and adding your instructions might be an even better solution.

The main thing is that being away from the office does not mean you have to wait until returning to the office to handle business client needs. Staying connected in a smart way will allow you to win more business and keep your existing customers happy. If you are wondering how to make your voicemail system provide voicemail to m-mail, just give us a call at 757-399-3350. We’ll help you with your connections to your customers.

Posted by Sid Cervarich, Vice President of Sales at HRCT. Sid has over 30 years of sales and implementation experience exclusively within the greater Hampton Roads area. His range of experience includes governmental as well as commercial solutions. His preference is to provide a consultative teamwork approach to solving customer requirements.

For more information and to ask questions, click here to contact Sid Cervarich.

Application Intelligence, Control and Visualization

Eric — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 18:48:49 +0000

As businesses migrate more and more applications to the cloud there becomes an increased need for management and control of employee productivity and the bandwidth purchased from your Internet Service Provider (ISP).

Before Web 2.0, when having a web based application wasn’t even possible, the only real need for filtering internet was to block sites that could cause a lawsuit, like pornography.

This just isn’t the case anymore. Chances are that you already have one business critical application running in the cloud and with that there is a need to protect the performance and reliability of that application. After all, you wouldn’t want to be denied access from a critical app because Jimmy is busy streaming music videos of his favorite band.

Here is an example: Many organizations have a legitimate business need for employees to develop customer relationships via Facebook but allowing your users to be on Facebook during working hours can be a slippery slope. You may find out that many hours per day are being wasted as your employees play games offered on Facebook.

What can you do? Implement a next generation firewall.

For the purpose of this article I’m going to focus on a partner of ours, SonicWALL. I consider SonicWALL one of the leading manufactures in next generation firewall technologies. They call there technology “Application Intelligence, Control & Visualization.”

Application Intelligence, Control and Visualization enables you to guarantee bandwidth and allow access for some applications while restricting or blocking either specific applications, categories of applications or to block application sub-components such as the Farmville game or file transfer from within Instant Messaging applications. You can even create rules in order to block specific lists from accessing these applications. This is all tracked by logging in to the Application Flow Monitor to see, through real-time visualization, the effectiveness of your new application control policy.

This one feature alone can pay for the cost of implementation in a matter of months. If you’d like more information or a consultation on this technology just give us a call!

For more information and to ask questions, click here to contact Eric Schueler.

Caller ID & Screen Pops

Eric — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 16:16:29 +0000

Technology has spoiled us – it’s true. Most of us have smart phones and are now expecting to at least see a picture of the person calling you before you answer the call and if not a photo then for sure their contact information – name, address etc. So when you are at work and your office phone rings and – - – nothing. Well, maybe the telephone number calling you and maybe a name, but for many business people, nothing. What the . . . .? Why can’t you have what your personal phone has been providing you for a long time? You can. You just need a business phone system that’s up to the task.

Let’s look at just a few of the ways your business phone system can potentially give you what you want. When that call comes in, you should at least be able to see the telephone number and name of the caller. But you’re in a business and lots of people in your company may have talked with the same person calling you. What happened on those calls? If you use a contact data base like Outlook, when the call rings in to your phone that contact information can simultaneously pop up on your computer screen, also known as a ‘screen pop’. Now you can see the photo, plus all standard contact information and in addition, if people are journaling calls for that contact, you see their notes as well. Your customers get better service because you know them better. Customers like that feeling of great service and screen pops really help your delivery.

But what about when you’re not in the office you ask? Now your smart phone can use apps to connect a call ringing in to your office and simultaneously screen pop your smart phone app. The presentation between your office and your smart phone will vary depending on a number of factors, but as long as your phone system can deliver, you’ll be better connected for business and your customers will be delighted to reach you instead of your voice mail.

If you are wondering if your telephone system can present Caller ID and screen pops, just give us a call at 757-399-3350 and we’ll help with the answers to your questions.

For more information and to ask questions, click here to contact Sid Cervarich.

Telephone Date & Time Change

Eric — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 14:59:33 +0000

I know, you’re looking at your telephone set display and the time (or day/date) is wrong. It may have been wrong since you started working for your company eons ago and no one knows how to change it. All is not lost. In fact, this is your lucky day because I know how to change it. Now I’ll be the first to admit there may be some business telephone systems out there that I don’t know how to change, but my list has been growing for over 30 years so you’ve got a good chance for help. Let’s start off with a sample:

If you have a Samsung business telephone system you can most likely make the change as follows:

Press the TRSF button
Dial 200
Enter pass code, which is 1234
Dial 1
Press the Speaker button
Dial 505
You will see on the display screen: WDDYYHHMM
Set the correct date & time by dialing the digits as follows:
W – Day of the week (1 for Monday)
MM – Month (01 for January)
DD – Day
YY – Year
HH – Hour (24 hour clock format of military time, 1PM = 13:00)
MM – Minute
Press TRSF button

You are done!

That wasn’t too bad was it? Now for the kicker, that only works for most Samsung telephone systems. If you have some other kind of telephone system just give us a call at 757-399-3350 and we’ll probably be able to help.

For more information and to ask questions, click here to contact Sid Cervarich.

Server Virtualization

stefan — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 17:00:47 +0000

In the old days (circa 2005), when a business was going to roll out a new application and it required 2 dedicated servers to run, the process for the network administrator was this:

1.   Order new hardware
2.   Wait for the hardware to arrive
3.   Mount the hardware and cable the hardware
4.   Install the operating systems and patch it with the latest updates on each server
5.   Install the application.

This time frame ranged from weeks to months.

With virtualization in place you would pick a server from a template, install the operating system and patch it, and then clone it to produce the second server. This can be done in one afternoon!

What I described is one of the benefits of virtualization.

Here is another: Your current hardware is 5 years old and isn’t keeping up with the demands of your network anymore. Without virtualization the task would take many days of procuring the new hardware, installing the operating system, installing patches, installing all the applications that the current server runs, and then migrating the data over. With virtualization you would simply move the virtual machine over to run on the updated hardware. Even if you didn’t have virtualization on your old servers the option to convert them from physical to virtual and place them on your new, more powerful, virtual server infrastructure is even available.

Now let’s look at efficiency. Many applications are not compatible with each other or if they ran on the same server it would create contention of resources. In no time at all we suddenly have 10 servers running at 10% capacity. This is a waste of hardware and a waste of electricity. With virtualization you can run all 10 servers on one physical server!

I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t that putting all my eggs in one basket?

In the past if one server failed you would only loose the application that the one server was powering. Now that there is only one server powering the workload of 10 servers and it failed, all 10 applications would be down. This is the very reason that you should always have 2 or more physical servers in your virtualization infrastructure. You plan for a server to go down in your design which means that the remaining servers need to be able to handle the workload of the server that fails. Technology has even made this process of failing over almost seamless.

Should your next investment in IT include virtualization? Absolutely.

For more information and to ask questions, click here to contact Eric Schueler.

Close Business Faster with uMobility and Mobex

stefan — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 20:25:11 +0000

Would you like to be able to close more business faster? Is providing superior customer service important? If your answer is yes then we have something just for you.

How often have you wished you could use your smartphone interchangeably with your office telephone? One telephone number reaching you wherever you are and still providing you with all of the connectivity you have when you are actually in the office is no longer a wish, it’s ready for you right now. Smartphone apps can link to your business telephone system allowing you to be in the office even when you are miles away. Wouldn’t simple things like answering business calls either on your smartphone or on your office phone make your life better? Regardless of which phone you answer from, wouldn’t it be great if you could transfer calls within your office? How great would it be to have all telephone devices you use to share the same voicemail box? Wouldn’t it be great to have your main office telephone number show to customers even when you are calling from your smartphone? How about being able to automatically shift to a Wi-Fi network during a call and not have to pay for costly minutes on your cellular bill, wouldn’t that be nice?

If you are on the go, HRCT can keep you connected via solutions using uMobility as well as Mobex. Our free consultation visit will allow us to help you accomplish more, even when you are away from the office.

For more information and to ask questions, click here to contact Sid Cervarich.

An Introduction to Cloud Computing

stefan — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 21:08:29 +0000

What exactly is “cloud”?

Many of us have been using cloud computing for a long time and don’t even realize it. It’s only recently that the marketing term has become so popular. Most of us have a personal e-mail account hosted by Google, Yahoo, MSN, the local Internet provider, etc..; this is cloud. Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service over the internet (or network) rather than by a product you would install on your computer or server.

Besides personal e-mail, other successful public cloud computing models include the popular salesforce.com for customer relationship management and DropBox for syncing files and folders to the cloud.

Should you be using cloud in your business? It depends…

On one end of the spectrum there is the business owner that would love to get rid of the burden and costs associated with purchasing, maintaining, and occasional down time that comes with keeping IT on premise. On the other end of the spectrum is the business owner that will never trust his business operations to be housed where he can’t see and touch it. I tend to fall somewhere in the middle of the road. I often recommend a cloud based service that provides a day to day solution that wouldn’t spell lost data or significant downtime if it were to go away. For instance, there is a lot of human error in remembering to take your secondary backup offsite in case of fire. Why not complement an onsite backup strategy by mirroring it to the cloud? Another example is SPAM filtering. In this case it can be costly to maintain a second server or appliance onsite just to remove SPAM before it arrives at your mail server. Why not deploy a cloud service to remove it before it reaches your network? In either of these cases there is very little risk in deploying these services because your business data remains on premise. If you decide you don’t want these services anymore you can simply cancel the service and have little to be changed with your own IT infrastructure.

For more information and to ask questions, click here to contact Eric Schueler.

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

admin — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 08:00:52 +0000

We along with the rest of the world offer our sympathies to the family of Steve Jobs, a true visionary in the field of technology. Many things we dreamed of achieving with regards to communication, Jobs either accomplished it or had come close to doing so during his tenure with Apple. He will be missed.

Read the official statement from Apple Inc. on the death of Steve Jobs.

Our New Website

admin — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 18:01:25 +0000

Hampton Roads Communication Technologies is proud to announce the launch of our new website, created in conjunction with CINIVA Web Agency of Virginia Beach! HRCT is still committed to providing Virginia Beach, Norfolk, and the rest of Hampton Roads with quality business telecommunications solutions, and when you visit our new website we hope you are able to find the assistance you need more quickly.

We invite you to have a look around the new site, and to call us today at 399-3350 with your questions and feedback about commercial and office telecommunications.