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| 1. | Redirecting your BlackBerry Folders |
| 2. | Sharing Calendars in Microsoft Office 2007 |
| 3. | Scheduling a Web Conference Using the “Schedule a Meeting” Option in Microsoft Live Meeting |
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CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT
Company name: SpeakerBox Communications
Products used: Hosted Exchange, Voice over IP (VoIP), Hosted BlackBerry Services
URL: www.speakerboxpr.com
Industry: Professional Services – Public Relations
Company size: 18 employees
Customer since: January 2009
Quote:
"We made a strategic decision to migrate our technology infrastructure to best-in-class solutions, and we couldn’t have made the move without Apptix. As a small business, we need to compete with bigger competitors, and Apptix’ hosted VoIP and Exchange solutions enable us to use technology as a productivity enhancement tool. No worries about our technology infrastructure going down, at a fraction of the cost! I’ve only had to ask myself, ‘why didn’t I move to Apptix a long time ago?'"
—Elizabeth Shea
President & CEO
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ON-DEMAND EVENTS
NEWS
- Apptix Counted Among Top Finalists for the 2009 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference Awards in Unified Communications Solutions, Messaging
- Apptix Launches Microsoft Outlook Voice Access for Exchange Server 2007
- Apptix Adopts 100% Uptime Service Level Agreement and Appoints Seasoned Executive Harold McGann Vice President of Customer Service
- Apptix Named as Finalist for Three 2009 American Business Awards Customer Service, Product Executive, and Product Department Recognized by Seventh Annual Stevie® Awards
- Search Mojo Saves 42% with Apptix’s Hosted VoIP
- Apptix Builds Resilient Hosted Services Environment With EMC Information Infrastructure
FROM DAVE'S DESK
SAVE OVER 20%* with Apptix Productivity Bundles and get your small business get up and running quickly! Get business-class email, mobility, and a Website with one of our robust Website plans. Some bundles also include collaboration tools which increase productivity and help your team collaborate from anywhere.
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Articles in this edition:
-
Spotlight: "Biztropolis: A Small Business Superhero Community"
Contributed Article: "Keeping the Lid on Spam"
Case Study: "DOYLES: Overcoming Hurricane Ike with Hosted VoIP and Exchange"
IT Tips & Tricks: "SharePoint 3.0"
Spotlight
Biztropolis
Join Biztropolis: A free online business community
Apptix is proud to have worked closely with small and mid-sized businesses for over a decade. As a trusted advisor to our customers, we are often asked for advice outside of the services we provide, questions such as, “can you recommend an email marketing solution for small business,” “how do I tackle difficult conversations with employees,” and “does my business need a blog, and why?” Because we recognize that small businesses everywhere share many of the same concerns, we decided to champion a new small business online community.
Biztropolis is a free business and IT community sponsored by Apptix. You may already be a member of other online communities, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace. Biztropolis takes the successful networking concepts used by those sites a step further.
By uniting business owners and technology professionals with peers and experts in IT, marketing, human resources, finance, public relations, and more, Biztropolis connects you to the expertise you need to help your business succeed. And by contributing, you help other companies succeed—because it takes a village.
The Biztropolis community:
- Is comprised of people who ask and answer business and IT “how do I?” questions
- Provides a place to share lessons learned
- Offers a place to get advice on topics—such as IT, human resources, public relations, marketing, and industry trends—from peers and experts who have "been there, done that"
- Provides a free customizable homepage to every member
- Features topic-driven blogs, forums, and Q&A sections
- Offers a library of small business resources
- Compiles business newsfeeds and videos regarding small business topics
To give you a flavor of the conversations on Biztropolis, here are some recently-posted topics by Biztropolis:
- “Top 10 Things for Small Businesses To Focus on in 2009”
- “Calling all SEO Experts—Small Business Needs Your Help!”
- “An Entrepreneur's Guide to Public Resources”
- “Is Social Networking Recession Proof?”
Some of you own small businesses. Some of you help launch them. Some of you manage their technology infrastructure. Biztropolis is for anyone with a stake in helping small companies succeed, and it’s free to join.
Check it out. Become a citizen of Biztropolis.
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Contributed Article
Keeping the Lid on Spam
Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE), better known as “spam,” is an ever-increasing problem for any organization that relies upon electronic messaging (email) for communications. Industry statistics show that over 80% of all email transmitted over the Internet is spam. What this means—to users of email and to organizations worldwide—is that spam is not only a constant annoyance, but that there are tangible productivity and financial losses caused by it.
Following are some thoughts for both email users and IT Guys to keep in mind when it comes to effectively protecting your systems and filtering spam.
- Use an anti-spam system or provider. Whether you implement an internal network appliance, a software product, or a hosted service to combat spam, don’t even think about instituting a corporate email system without robust and proven protection in place. The problem with spam is that there is no way for you to know the motivations behind it—which messages are harmless, which are from a real company, and which could be harmful in some way (to your computer or identity). For this reason, the basic rule of thumb is: “no spam should be trusted.”
- Don’t forget perimeter protection. Perimeter protection consists of one or more layers of networking hardware and software designed to catch, filter, or divert traffic at the edge of your network so it doesn’t get inside the internal network or servers. This protection is costly and requires constant monitoring; however, the potential damage caused by this traffic getting into your network is far worse. If “bad” traffic enters your network and then you try to deal with it, you have already paid for the increased bandwidth/traffic—and also likely overloaded your internal servers. A third-party hosted perimeter protection and anti-spam system is a far better solution than anything most companies can afford to deploy internally.
- Prevent your mail gateways and servers from accepting inbound email from the Internet. If you can leverage a third-party hosted provider of perimeter and/or anti-spam filtering, you can then configure your email system SMTP gateways to accept email only from that provider. All traffic inbound to your network would then be delivered to your hosted provider. Only then, after being filtered, would it be forwarded to your SMTP gateways. Those unwanted packets of data would then get thrown away without ever entering your network—preventing your network from processing it, and saving you both money and bandwidth.
- Use caution when white listing. White listing an email address ensures that it will not get caught in a spam filter. That said, use caution because white listing a national Website or newspaper—e.g. wsj.com/Wall Street Journal—means that any incoming email “pretending” to be from wsj.com will get through. This is a common technique for spammers.
Also find alternatives to white listing your own company domain name within your anti-spam system. Most spammers “spoof” (fake) the email address of incoming spam so it appears to come from your own company’s email system. This is a technique used to get past your spam filters, and it often works. If you must white list a domain to ensure that nothing gets quarantined, try to do so only at the end-user or department level. This will keep the rest of the company from receiving potential spam from the email domain.
- White list any partner or marketing provider by IP address—not email domain name. If you wish to guarantee that you continue to receive emails sent from your partners or vendors, you might be tempted to white list their email domain name. Instead, have them submit to you a list of their SMTP server IP addresses (e.g. 123.123.123.1), and program your anti-spam or perimeter defense systems to allow safe delivery of emails from these IP addresses. If you add only their email domain name, spammers can easily (and often do) spoof that email address and it would get right past your email protection systems.
- Discourage employees from using third-party POP or IMAP accounts via Outlook. Many corporations have an acceptable use policy that states not to link personal email accounts into your corporate email account, so be sure to keep these accounts separate—and safe. Whenever possible, try to prevent your end-users from using non-corporate email systems, such as Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail, etc. If they configure their local Outlook software to pull from these email systems, they are also pulling in spam, potential viruses, worms, and more into your email environment, and are bypassing your perimeter and anti-spam systems. The same goes for users who program Gmail, for example, to forward a copy of their personal email to their corporate email system—they are exposing the corporate email system to additional traffic, spam, viruses, etc.
- Recommend that employees register at Websites using their personal email address. To a spammer, the most valuable piece of Internet real estate is a valid email address for a real, live human being. Corporations should remind their users to limit their use of corporate email address when signing up for Websites, subscriptions, etc. Many of these companies sell or share the email address, which is then sold and traded all over the Internet. Using a secondary email address on a “free” system—such as Hotmail, Yahoo!, or Gmail—will go a long way to curbing the spam attempting to enter the corporate email environment.
- Not all executive requests should be honored. Users, including your company executives, who demand an email domain name to be white listed (or black listed, for that matter) need to be informed that the ramifications of this change could affect the entire company. It is very common for IT personnel to “give in” to the requests of executives demanding that “their emails” never get caught in a spam filter. Education (give them the related whitepaper, for example) is the key to helping them understand the ramifications of their request.
- Consider hosted email, anti-spam, and email protection. The business of email protection, anti-spam, and providing enterprise-class messaging systems is complex—and yet continues to grow in popularity and criticality for most organizations. Both small and large organizations can save money by outsourcing their email systems to a reliable hosted email service provider that has the technical skills, 24/7 live customer service, network/perimeter security, anti-spam, anti-virus, and redundant/clustered server farms required for today’s modern messaging needs.
Using a variety of specialized network monitoring tools, intrusion detection, and anti-virus software, we go the extra mile to ensure that your accounts are safe and running smoothly. In addition, Apptix provides several tiers of spam protection, including standard Microsoft filtering and perimeter protection, which includes basic inbound and outbound protections, protection from denial of service attacks, directory harvesting, email bombs, and basic blacklisting. All of our environments also offer a premium anti-spam defense from MX Logic.
For more information, download the full-length whitepaper.
Learn more about Apptix premium anti-spam services.
Case Study
DOYLES: Overcoming Hurricane Ike with Hosted VoIP and Exchange
When Hurricane Ike pounded the Gulf coast in September 2008, DOYLES—a global pressure-control equipment manufacturing company with more than 200 employees in seven offices—needed to evacuate… fast. Armed with Apptix Voice, a hosted VoIP service, DOYLES switched their main incoming phone number from their Houston office to one of their smaller offices… one not in the path of the storm.
Apptix hosted VoIP made it easy. DOYLES employees were safe from the storm, they never missed an incoming phone call, and their customers never knew they had relocated their headquarters. As an added bonus, because they also use hosted Exchange email from Mailstreet (a subsidiary of Apptix) DOYLES was able to evacuate without worrying about their email going down or their servers getting damaged by the storm. Wherever DOYLES went, their hosted email and VoIP services followed.
—John Cameron,
IT Director for DOYLES
DOYLES joined the MailStreet and Apptix ranks in 2007. With seven offices’ worth of phones and email to keep track of, managing those systems was a daily challenge prior to choosing a hosted solution. Before switching, DOYLES was busy growing their successful company—they didn’t always have time to focus on why they received so much spam, or how they could better manage their phone system to support the needs of their growing firm.
John Cameron, IT Director for DOYLES, had experience with MailStreet hosted email from his previous career as an IT consultant. He discussed MailStreet with the owners of DOYLES, and they soon implemented hosted Exchange across their offices. From the outset, the system provided a cost-effective, reliable, email system—one that also eliminated their spam issues. As an added bonus, MailStreet enabled DOYLES to back up their email messages on a regular basis—a feature they didn’t have with their old system. “We have had MailStreet’s Exchange up and running for over a year, and it works great. No spam, and no dropped emails,” says Cameron.
When the time came to streamline their phone system, Cameron again turned to MailStreet, via their Apptix Voice offering. The hosted VoIP solution seemed like a natural extension to Exchange, and they have been pleased from the outset. Hosted VoIP enables quick and simple extension dialing between their disparate offices, and VoIP’s additional features—voicemail, custom hold music/messages, Find Me/Follow Me, and the Telephony Toolbar, for example—have been a tremendous benefit to the DOYLES team. “Now our seven offices are totally linked together, each person has voicemail, and they can configure their phone based on their daily needs. Our entire employee base benefits from hosted VoIP,” says Cameron. Every IT guy’s dream.
Apptix hosted VoIP and MailStreet Exchange enabled DOYLES to “install it and forget it,” letting them instead focus on continuing to expand their successful business and provide outstanding customer service—whatever the weather, wherever the situation.
“MailStreet and Apptix offer the perfect solution—hosted VoIP and Exchange—for the way our company is set up. Our seven offices are spread out, yet we have the ability to work successfully—between locations—with zero issues,” says Cameron. Every hosting company’s dream.
Download the complete case study
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IT Tips & Tricks
SharePoint 3.0
The following Tips & Tricks are SharePoint 3.0-specific. If you are using an earlier version of SharePoint and would like to upgrade to 3.0, please contact Customer Service at 866.428.0130.
To learn more about SharePoint collaboration services, register for our free Webinar.
Topics:
- How do I get WSS 3.0 SharePoint contacts to show up in my Outlook?
- How can I see my WSS 3.0 SharePoint calendar and my personal calendar in Outlook 2007?
- Is there a way to map my WSS 3.0 SharePoint site as a network place, and browse like I do with my file server?
- How can I work with SharePoint 3.0 documents offline?
-
How can I learn how to better use SharePoint 3.0?
- How do I get WSS 3.0 SharePoint contacts to show up in my Outlook?
- In your Web browser, go to the Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services contact list that you want to access within Microsoft Outlook.
- Click Actions > Connect to Outlook.
- Click Yes.
- How can I see my WSS 3.0 SharePoint calendar and my personal calendar in Outlook 2007?
- In a Web browser, find the SharePoint calendar to which you want to link, and open it.
- Click Actions > Connect to Outlook.
- Click Yes.
- In Outlook 2007, in the Calendar view, the SharePoint calendar is added in the Other Calendars area.
- To display several calendars at once, click the checkboxes for the calendars you want to view.
- The arrow changes color when you point to it or click it. When you click the arrow, the tab moves to the left.
- To add another calendar to the overlay, repeat the previous steps.
- Is there a way to map my WSS 3.0 SharePoint site as a Network Place, and browse like I do with my file server?
- Open the file explorer or My Computer.
- From the Tools menu, choose Map Network Drive….
- At the bottom of the dialog, click the Sign up for online storage or connect to a network server link.
- Click Next.
- Select Choose another network location, and click Next.
- In the Internet or network address field, paste in the URL of the site or sub-site to which you want to link, and click Next.
- Type your login information.
- Type a new name for the network place, if necessary.
- Click Next.
- Click Finish.
- How can I work with SharePoint 3.0 documents offline?
- How can I learn how to better use SharePoint 3.0?
Note: Colligo is a third-party product, and customer support is provided directly from Colligo.
Colligo Reader connects to SharePoint using standard Web services and site permissions, and then downloads the content to a local file store on the Windows file system, which preserves document links.
Colligo Contributor 2.1 is for laptop users, such as members of project teams—with "Contributor," "Designer," or "Administrator" privileges—who need to frequently modify content on their SharePoint sites. Contributor enables them to create and edit documents, forms, list items, and their associated properties when working offline, and then synchronizes changes back to the server when they return online.
Apptix provides free 30-day trials of Colligo so you can determine which works best for you. Both products can be found on our Partner Products page at http://www.sharepointsite.com/products/colligo/contributor.
There are many options available to you when it comes to SharePoint training. One excellent choice is Apptix’s free training. This is a great alternative if you want to learn how to use SharePoint at your own pace, or for specific areas of interest.
There are also many certified training centers offering in-depth SharePoint training taught in a multi-day course in cities around the U.S. This type of training is typically very hands-on, and covers the issues you need addressed. Other options include online training providers, who offer instructional training in an online environment, including videos and Q&A forums.
To access Apptix’s free SharePoint training, please go to http://sptraining.sharepointsite.net.
To learn more about SharePoint collaboration services, register for our free Webinar.