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CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT

Search-MOJO

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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The Cloud
Newsletter Issue 2 - 2008

Articles in this edition:


Product Spotlight: Did You Know VoIP Can Do This?

SharePoint: Improving Collaboration with Clients and Business Partners while Reducing Business Costs

Hosted Exchange & VoIP: Helping Virtual Offices Succeed

IT Tips & Tricks: Five Fantastic FAQs for Microsoft Outlook 2007

Product Spotlight


Did You Know VoIP Can Do This?

The following underutilized—and highly valuable—VoIP  features come with Apptix’s premium VoIP package, and are easily configurable via either the Telephony Toolbar (for Internet Explorer, FireFox, and Outlook) and the VoIP Web console.

VOIP Portal
  • Use call routing to stay in touch: Transfer incoming voicemail from John’s phone to Mary’s phone to Tom’s voicemail to Lisa’s email inbox—wherever you need a voicemail to go, it goes. Listen to your voicemail the old fashioned way (desk phone), have a .wav file of the message sent as email attachment to your Outlook inbox, and listen to the attachment on your PC or mobile device. The options are endless!
  • Create custom hold music or messages: Record music or messages that your customers hear while on hold. Use this feature to advertise cool new products, provide recorded notifications, or make special offers.
  • Make your phone calls find/follow you: Decide where and how you want your phone to ring. Need to roam around the office but have a critical call coming in to your desk? Route it to your mobile. Or have calls ring at your desk only, have them ring simultaneously at both your desk and mobile device, or have them forwarded to any phone—a hotel phone, your home line, your mobile—wherever you choose.
  • Software PhoneUse your computer like it’s a phone: Use the software phone (and a headset), installed on your laptop, to emulate your desk phone from anywhere in the world where you have Internet access. When you dial a number from the softphone application, it appears as though you are dialing from your desk line. So whether you’re in Jamaica or Jersey, people will think you’re at your desk—internal extension dialing included.
  • Take “Remote Office” home with you: In addition to the softphone feature, VoIP enables call routing. When you’re at home but need to make a customer call (and don’t want the customer to see your home number), make the call using VoIP’s Remote Office and Telephony Toolbar. The call is bridged to your home phone, then dials the customer’s number. And no one is the wiser.
  • Make the Telephony Toolbar your friend: The Telephony Toolbar—an Internet Explorer, FireFox, and Outlook add-on toolbar—provides access to all of the above functionality, so you can create the most optimal phone system and setup to suit your needs.

Download Customizing VOIP Guide
Download
"Customizing
VoIP" Guide

The best VoIP features are often the ones that don’t come with traditional phone systems—the flexibility, the capability to be anywhere and still stay in touch, and the personal configurability. VoIP goes above and beyond traditional phone systems, and is a benefit whether you’re inside or outside of the office.

If you are currently using the Apptix Voice Business package and would like to upgrade to the premium package please, call 866.688.0127 or email us at sales@apptixvoice.com.




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Contributed Article


Michale Fuchs, President DataBridgeSharePoint: Improving Collaboration with Clients and Business Partners while Reducing Business Costs

by Michael Fuchs, President, dataBridge

SharePoint collaboration Websites can benefit your business by enabling you to communicate and collaborate with customers, vendors, and business partners. Collaborating through SharePoint helps you provide more attentive services, and alleviates the financial burdens of frequent travel and shipping costs. Note to SharePoint newbies this is not your grandmother's SharePoint! The following sites really are SharePoint sites.

Using SharePoint 3.0, following are examples of how three of dataBridge’s client companies are doing just that.

Karastan Carpet & Rug ManufacturerKarastan, a carpet and rug manufacturer, needed a secure way to efficiently communicate with the reps across the country who service their dealer network. Karastan’s SharePoint site enables them to post price lists, merchandising information, marketing & promotions calendars, and general announcements. Each dealer "Rep Group" has its own site and dashboard. Just like a car dashboard delivers critical information to the driver, each dealer dashboard delivers current and important company information at a glance—newest documents, announcements, calendars, links, and so on. As new documents, events, and announcements get added to the site, the information is automatically posted to the dashboard, making it easy for dealers to stay informed and access files. SharePoint provides Karastan with a secure online environment that is easy to navigate, can be accessed from any computer 24/7, and is nearly effortless to maintain and manage.

The Biltmore Estate Similarly, The Biltmore Estate needed an effective way to communicate photo shoots, partner networking, marketing and event calendars, and Biltmore collateral and images to their licensees across the country. Each licensee needed a way to get approved photos and logos as well as an easy way to get updated dealer information to Biltmore. SharePoint provides the perfect solution. As new documents, events, and announcements get added to the site, an email alert is automatically sent out to all site subscribers—making it easy for the licensees to stay informed and connected. At the same time, as licensees are uploading information to the Biltmore SharePoint site, it is routed to the correct person using workflows, ensuring a quick response.

Both Karastan and The Biltmore have significantly reduced the number of incoming calls and emails requesting information—all of which is now available on their SharePoint sites.

Twist Integrated marketingTwist, a St. Louis firm specializing in integrated marketing programs, uses SharePoint in three ways. First, they use it as a company intranet to help employees communicate, collaborate, and manage documents. Second, they use it as an extranet; each of Twist’s clients has their own private, secure site where they store and collaborate on documents related to each company. This has helped Twist eliminate the “email + attachment” nightmare most companies face these days. Third, Twist wanted to be in control of their public Website, not at the mercy of a vendor who would update their content. To avoid that, they use SharePoint as a Content Management System. This enables Twist to update and edit their Website at will. They use SharePoint to accomplish everything—without any additional software—providing savings of time and money.

Saving money in the current economy is extremely important and there are so many possibilities with SharePoint—intranets, extranets, project management solutions, knowledge bases, Websites, and on and on. What can SharePoint do for you?

dataBridge has been an Apptix service partner for five years, providing SharePoint development, training, and design services to many of Apptix’s SharePoint customers. You can contact Michael at michael@getsharepoint.com.

For more information on Apptix hosted SharePoint services, please visit www.apptix.com/sharepoint/.



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KrengeltechCase Study


Hosted Exchange & VoIP: Helping Virtual
Offices Succeed

A virtual office is only as good as its communications backbone. As an IT consulting company, Krengel Technologies is highly capable of managing their own communications systems, but would rather spend time supporting their customers than supporting themselves. So in January 2006, they partnered with Apptix for hosted Exchange services, enabling powerful, cost-effective email and wireless device connectivity among their employees. But that answered only part of their communications needs.

In both the online marketing and software development fields, attracting the best talent often depends on providing the most conducive work environment. At Krengel, that means working at home—wherever home is. It also means having the freedom to work flexible hours, or to travel to speaking engagements without sacrificing your availability to the customer. As a result, Krengel’s clients get the best of both worlds: the innovative talent of a large company combined with the attentive, flexible services of a small business. Hosted Exchange helped Krengel reliably stay connected via the computer, but their phone system—the lifeblood for any small company—wasn’t keeping pace.

“For us, the value is off the charts. It’s one thing to have a bunch of bells and whistles. But with Apptix, we have functional, usable tools that make core business functions more effective.”

—Quentin Krengel
President, Krengel Technology
www.krengeltech.com

For a while, Krengel made do with Vonage—when it worked—and mobile phones when it didn’t. Krengel quickly realized, however, that the quality of their communications reflected upon the quality of their business. They deliver world-class software and services, and their phone system didn’t follow suit.

After comparing features and prices among hosted VoIP providers, Krengel chose Apptix Voice. Having already been an Apptix hosted Exchange customer for more than a year, Krengel was confident in Apptix’s ability to deliver reliable service. And with Apptix Voice, they received features they couldn’t get from any other single solution, such as call routing, the ability to be transferred to an operator, interaction with mobile devices, and FindMe/FollowMe capabilities.

Today, Krengel’s business communications system is perfectly aligned with the image they want to present to customers and prospects. Their hosted Exchange is a tremendously reliable benefit to their business. Their mobile email capabilities enable them to conduct business from anywhere. And hosted VoIP ties it all together, ensuring a successful, remote workforce.

Download the complete case study

Read more customer stories


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IT Tips & Tricks


Five Fantastic FAQs for Microsoft Outlook 2007

  1. How do I Archive My Outlook Mailbox?
  2. How do I Export a PST File (download a copy of my mailbox data)?
  3. How Do I Set Up a Resource in Outlook?
  4. Why Can’t I Save My Outlook Password?
  5. Why should I Add an Autodiscover CNAME Record in Exchange 2007?

Download the PDF Tips and Tricks guide

1. How do I AutoArchive My Outlook Mailbox?

Use the AutoArchive feature to manage the size of your Exchange mailbox. The AutoArchive feature moves the data off of the server and to a local .pst (Personal Folder File) file on your hard drive. The Export feature (covered below) creates a copy of your mailbox data, and creates a local .pst file of that data.

NOTE: Apptix recommends that you set your AutoArchive options via the Tools menu, which propagates your designated options as the default options for all of your Outlook folders and subfolders.

To set default AutoArchive options via the Tools menu
:

  1. From the Tools menu, choose Options….

    check The Options dialog displays.

  2. Setting default AutoArchive Options

  3. Click the Other tab (shown above).

    check The Other tab displays.
  4. In the AutoArchive section, click the AutoArchive… button (shown above).

    check The AutoArchive dialog displays.

  5. AutoArchive
  6. Set your archiving properties.

    NOTE: Apptix recommends that you set AutoArchive to clean items every 1-2 months (shown in red above).

  7. Click OK.

    check Your AutoArchive settings are saved.
To set AutoArchive options for individual mail folders:

  1. In your Outlook folder list (left column), right-click the folder you want to archive, and choose Properties.

    check The Properties dialog for that folder displays.
  2. Click the AutoArchive tab.
  3. Click a radio button to choose one of the following archiving options:

    • Do not archive items in this folder
    • Archive items in this folder using the default settings (the settings you designated above using the Tools menu)
    • Archive this folder using these settings (change the settings for each individual folder)
  4. Once you have finished setting your AutoArchive features, click OK.

    check Your AutoArchive settings are saved.

  5. NOTE: In addition to setting the default AutoArchive options (above), Apptix recommends that you archive the following folders: Inbox (and other mail folders), Sent Items, and Deleted Items. You do not need to archive "reference" items, such as Calendar, Notes, or Tasks.

To view the archive in Outlook:

  1. To view your archived data (.pst file), go to the File menu and choose Data File Management.
  2. Click Add…, select the archived .pst file from your PC’s hard drive or network, and click OK.
  3. Navigate through the available .pst files, choose the file to access, and click OK.

    check The Personal Folders dialog displays.
  4. Ensure that you have selected the correct file, and click OK.
  5. All archived .pst files can be located in your Outlook folder list (left column). In the example below, the archived .pst file is named Personal Folders-Backup.

  6. Folder List

    NOTE: Archiving works on “modified date,” so if you set the archive parameter to one month, and you started a Task five weeks ago but it was modified three weeks ago, the Task remains in the Server mailbox—and is not archived because the modified date does not meet the archiving parameter date of one month.

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2. How do I Export a PST File (download a copy of my mailbox data)?

The Export feature creates a copy of your mailbox data, and creates a local .pst file of that data. The AutoArchive feature (covered above) moves the data off the server to a local .pst file on your hard drive.

It is good practice to set up an AutoArchive to manage your mailbox size, however AutoArchive does not select Contacts data (Exchange does not remove Contacts from the server). Therefore, it is a good idea to periodically export your Contacts to a local .pst file to maintain a good backup of your Contact list (this applies to other mailbox folders, as well, but we refer to Contacts as they are important to many users, and are not covered by AutoArchive).

To export data from your Exchange mailbox to a local .pst file:

  1. Open your Outlook mailbox.
  2. From the File menu, choose Import and Export....

    check The Import and Export Wizard displays.

  3. Import & Export Wizard

  4. Choose Export to a file, and click Next.

    check The Export to a File dialog displays.

  5. Export A File

  6. Choose Personal Folder File (.pst), and click Next.

    check The Export Personal Folders dialog displays.

  7. Export Personal Folders

  8. Choose Mailbox - <Your Display name> to export the entire mailbox (top option above), or choose the Contacts folder (bottom option above). To export all subfolders associated with the selected item, click the Include subfolders checkbox.
  9. Click Next.
  10. In the resulting dialog, type a name for the .pst file and select the file creation options desired.
  11. Click Finish.

    check Outlook creates a copy of your mailbox data as a local .pst file.

  12. NOTE: This action could take some time to complete, depending upon the size of the data being exported.
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3. How Do I Set Up a Resource in Outlook?

Resources are mailboxes, with some automated calendar processing, that are used to manage a company’s assets. Assets can be anything shared among employees: conference rooms, projectors, company cars, etc.

To set up a Resource:

  1. In the Admin console, create the Resource mailbox.

    • Example
      :
    • Display Name: Conference Room#1
    • Email Address: conf1@yourdomain.com
    • Userlogin: Conference.Room1
    • Password: letmein

    NOTE: You must provision a full mailbox for the Resource function.


    • Designate a Resource administrator: set up a Profile that connects to the resource mailbox
    • Post the Resource calendar to those in your domain who require access to the Resource
    • Set the auto-processing properties of the Resource calendar (Tools/Options/Calendar Options/Resource Scheduling)
  2. Check/uncheck the three available options, as needed.
  3. Set permissions for those to have access to the Resource.

    check The Resource is now available for scheduling via Outlook.

To reserve a Resource as part of a meeting request:

  1. In the left pane of your Outlook window, switch to your Calendar view.
  2. Click the New button, and choose Meeting Request.

    check The Meeting Request window displays.

  3. Meeting Request

  4. Choose a time for the appointment.
  5. To add attendees and Resources, click the To… button (shown in red above).

    check The Select Attendees and Resources window displays.

  6. Select All Attendees

  7. To invite attendees, search for the attendee’s name and click either the Required or Optional buttons to add them to the meeting request.
  8. To add a Resource, search for the Resource and click the Resources button (shown in red above) to add it to the meeting request.
  9. When you are finished setting up your attendees and Resources, click OK.

    check The Meeting Request window redisplays.
  10. To book the meeting and Resource, click Send.

    check The Resource is booked.
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4. Why Can’t I Save My Outlook Password?


Microsoft Exchange was originally designed as an internal Mail Service, which uses Active Directory authentication once your machine is logged into the domain.

That said, your machine is not part of the Active Directory domain within the hosted Exchange environment. As such, you cannot save the password in your Outlook profile. In a hosted environment, you are basically authenticating to an external forest. Outlook does cache the last user login used so that you only need to enter your password each time.


What if Outlook doesn’t prompt me for my password?

If Outlook fails to prompt you for your username and password prior to opening, it is an indication that Outlook may have failed to close properly the last time you used it. As such, you may have trouble using Outlook in your current session.

To fix this problem:

  1. Use the Task Manager to close any prior Outlook.exe sessions, and then relaunch Outlook.
  2. Press Ctl-Alt-Delete to open Windows Task Manager.
  3. Click Task Manager.

    check The Windows Task Manager dialog displays.
  4. Click the Processes tab, and click the Image Name field to sort alphabetically.
  5. Windows Task Manager

  6. Select all Outlook.exe sessions, click End Process, and then restart Outlook.

    check You should be prompted to enter your username and password to successfully authenticate and access your mailbox.
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5. Why should I Add an Autodiscover CNAME Record?

For Apptix customers on the Exchange 2007 Server environment, Microsoft requires an extra DNS entry (autodiscover CNAME) in order to implement many of the collaboration features of Exchange.

Missing the autodiscover CNAME entry will not affect the sending and/or delivery of email, but it will generate various "synch errors" within Outlook, and can cause features—such as free/busy and updates to the Global Address List—to fail.

To resolve this issue, you need to access your DNS records and add a new CNAME record called autodiscover. This will create the record autodiscover.yourdomain.com. This record should "point" or "resolve" to:

  • MailStreet: autodiscover.mseX.exchange.ms (where “X” is the number of your hosted Exchange environment)
  • Apptix onDemand: autodiscoverredirect.collaborationhost.net

We cannot provide explicit instructions for how to change this for your DNS interface, but you need to create this autodiscover CNAME record for any domains you have routing to our Exchange environment. Updates to your DNS should take 1-4 hours to post to the Internet once the changes have been made.


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