Even Smart Business People Need to Protect Themselves Online

I received an email the other day saying I could get 68% off luxury watches. Then a few seconds later I received another email saying I could get 88% off luxury watches, and both emails pointed me to the same web site! So for fun I went to the web site and it told me I could get luxury watches for 85% off.

All this to say that you can’t really trust emails from people you don’t know. In the past twelve months alone, I must have run across fifteen distraught widows of world leaders who had huge sums of money to deposit if only they could find a bank account number with which to do so.

Now those are obvious things to avoid, but there are some pretty sophisticated scams out there on the Internet, and I read all the time about people being taken in.

Even smart people like you. So maybe it’s time for a refresher course on how to protect yourself online.

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Landing Pages Keep Your Website Working Even If You Are Not

Now is the high-tide of the year,
     And whatever of life hath ebbed away
Comes flooding back with a ripply cheer
 ─ From What is So Rare As a Day in June, by James Russell Lowell

There is something about June that makes living in Nova Scotia worthwhile. The browns of late winter transformed to greens and our spring cleanup out of the way, we can now look forward to warm lazy summer days.

But while things start to slow down for you, there is no reason for your website to hold back. To keep it working effectively for you all summer, you can do a bit of website “spring cleaning” by setting up landing pages.

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Organizations, Certifications Keys to IT Professionalism

What makes a good Information Technology professional? Is it simply good training, gritty determination, logical thinking, and the ability to put in long hours alone at the keyboard?

That may be part of it, but a more complete answer would include communicating effectively, understanding business needs, dressing smartly, belonging to professional organizations, and acquiring certifications.

My company, Nicom IT Solutions, pays particular attention to these organizations and certifications and I will summarize the ones that exist in Nova Scotia. If you are in IT, you’ll want to check these out. If you want to find good IT organizations and individuals who can help your business, this article is a good place to start.

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Save Money by Using Virtualization

In 2008, there was a lot of talk around communications devices, but in many corporations one of the hottest IT topics was a technology called “virtualization”. So I’ll start the new year by explaining what virtualization is and why you might be interested in it.

Simply put, virtualization is a way of making a single computer do the work of many. As organizations buy more and more powerful hardware, they often find themselves with too much equipment and with capacity than is not being used.

With virtualization technology, these organizations can partition pieces of a single computer and use it for multiple purposes, efficiently using its capacity.

Without virtualization, companies often use multiple pieces of hardware, called servers, each one running a particular piece of software, confusingly also called a server. So the software servers, such as Windows Server (used for sharing files and running applications), SQL Server (used for corporate databases), Exchange Server (used for email), Internet Information Server (used for hosting websites), etc., each run on their own computer.

If each computer is only partially utilized, there can be tremendous waste in the cost of equipment, electricity, floor space, air conditioning, etc.

With virtualization, any number of software servers can run on a single computer, optimizing the use of hardware. In fact, even desktop operating systems like Windows XP, Vista, or Linux can be run in a virtual environment, and so can individual program applications. How they are configured is controlled by utilities that you use to allocate available hardware to your needs. These utilities allow you to set up “virtual machines”, whereby you allocate pieces of the computer’s central processing unit, memory, hard drive, and other resources, to each virtual machine.

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Holiday Mixture – Remix

Last year for the holidays I rallied the troops at my office to see if we could come up with tips and trick that you can use every day when using technology and we came up with quite a number of suggestions.

Once again our staff gave generously and here is this year’s list for you to unwrap:

1. Always be skeptical of an email’s origin, regardless of whether or not it’s from a known sender. In particular, do not open attachments that end in .ZIP or .EXE unless you are sure of what these files are and from whom they came.
2. If you inadvertently delete a file, chances are you’ll be able to find it in the Recycle Bin.
3. Speed up your computer by “defragmentation”.  You can find this by double-clicking “My Computer” and then right-clicking on the disk drive, opening the “Tools” tab, and choosing “Properties”.
4. Make sure your laptop data is backed up in case you damage or lose it. You’d be surprised at the tales of woe I hear all the time. One thing to consider is a small business server, where several people’s files are centralized and backed up. You can synchronize your laptop with the server which means any changes you make on the laptop will be done on the server. This may be cheaper and easier than you think.
5. When creating PowerPoint presentations, remember “Lucky number 7”. Put no more than seven words per bullet, and seven bullets per slide.


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