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Michael Cocanower
President, itSynergy |
Welcome
I'd like to jump right in this month with
an exciting announcement: I hope you will
all join me in welcoming Lori Johnson to our
team! Lori has joined itSynergy as a User
Support Specialist as of February 4.
Lori comes to us from one of our larger
customers where she served as the in house
IT coordinator and provided the vast
majority of the organization's desktop
support. In her role as a User Support
Specialist, Lori will fill an area where we
felt we had a gap in the past - providing
direct end user desktop support at an hourly
rate below any of our engineers. |
Many times our customers had more basic issues
which our engineers are certainly happy to help
with, but the technical expertise required wasn't a
match with their depth of experience. Lori is now
able to fill in that area and provide a better fit
for desktop issues at a lower rate.
In addition to Lori's work as a User Support
Specialist, she is also very passionate about
Microsoft's Sharepoint family of products. In the
long term, we have charged her with developing some
very specific packaged offerings for our customers
around Microsoft Sharepoint. Stay tuned over the
next few months for more details in that area.
Finally, I just want to share with you all that I
am being a bit tight lipped this month, and it is
VERY difficult for me. We have a LOT of initiatives
under way right now related to our growth and
expansion. I was hoping to be able to make some big
announcements this month, but we haven't quite
dotted all of the i's and crossed all of the t's
yet, so just know that there is a lot going on at
itSynergy, and we have some big announcements in the
pipeline which I'm looking forward to making next
month.
Thanks as always for reading, and enjoy the
newsletter! |
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7 Rules for Managing a Mobile
Workforce
by Joanna L. Krotz
reprinted with permission from the Microsoft Small Business Center
It's 10 a.m. Do you know where your
employees are?
The ranks of mobile workers are
swelling, fueled by the wireless Internet, powerful handheld devices, VPNs
(virtual private networks), and WLANs (wireless local area networks). |
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As many as nine out of every 10
employees now work from locations other than company headquarters, according to
Nemertes Research, a New York market researcher that specializes in emerging
technologies. In addition, some 40% to 70% of employees work in locations remote
from their supervisors.
No wonder. Hiring remote workers can
provide big benefits for small business. "Employers can cut the costs of office
space as well as recruit from a much larger talent pool," says Manny Avramidis,
senior vice president of global human resources at the American Management
Association (AMA).
Read on for rules |
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6 Tips for a 'Paperless' Office
by Joseph Anthony
reprinted with permission from the Microsoft Small Business Center
Many people who use computers -
whether it's for their home or business - are moving toward a "paperless"
office. Simply, they are tired and overwhelmed by scraps of paper, clunky old
file folders, envelopes - and they want to reduce the clutter.
Don't believe me? Take a look at how
many messages are stored in your e-mail's in-basket. Now imagine how much paper
would have been generated if they hadn't come to you from cyberspace. |
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Many folks have made at least a
partial move to a paperless office. They're doing so this way: by using scanners
instead of copying machines, sending electronic faxes instead of paper faxes,
storing information electronically instead of in filing cabinets, giving
friends, clients or vendors information on CDs or through Internet attachments
instead of in bound folders. In short, they're getting greater return on their
hardware, software and technology investments.
Want to join the anti-paper campaign?
Save a few trees along the way?
Here are six things to keep in mind as you move
toward a paperless home or business office.
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System Engineering Corner
Notes
from the Network Engineering Department:
Note to readers: As our network engineers
work with all of you across our entire customer
base, they observe trends and issues that many
people have in common, or that many customers will
find helpful to know about.
This section is designed
to give them a mechanism to communicate those issues
to you, with the hope that YOU might benefit from.
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Tech Corner
It seems like several times per month that one of us gets an email from a
customer that is a forwarded message from someone else they know with a stern
warning about impending disaster. Often times the message even comes from
someone they consider to be credible, and so they put great faith in the message
they received.
The actual message varies, but it is always some sort of massive virus or
other tool of destruction which will surely wreak havoc throughout civilization
if you don't take action and warn others right away.
We have a pretty standard procedure we follow when receiving such a message,
so we thought we'd share it with you so that you might have the resources at
your finger tips to determine whether or not you should be worried.
The first thing to do is to find out of the email is a hoax (which it is
99.9% of the time). Our favorite site to check it out is
http://www.snopes.com . If you put the
subject line of the email you received in the search box at the top of the site,
you'll probably find a detailed article on the site you're looking for.
As an example, I recently received a message warning me of the impending
flood of telemarketing calls I was about to get on my cell phone if I didn't
register that number with the national "Do Not Call" directory. A quick search
on the Snopes site gets me this
http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/cell411.asp which not only
tells me it is false, but gives me the 'real' skinny on the whole thing.
So next time you receive an email with a harried warning about the latest
impending disaster, head over to
http://www.snopes.com before doing anything else. Once you figure out
it is a fake, instead of forwarding the original message on to all of your
friends as it instructs you, forward the link to Snopes instead, and help people
find the truth about Internet hoaxes.
Happy Hoaxing! |
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February 2008
In this issue
□
Welcome
□ Managing a Mobile Workforce
□ Paperless Office
□ Tech Corner
□ Referral Program
□ How Bill Gates uses
Office Hours
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itSynergy Referral Program
 Can we
buy you dinner and send you to the movies? How about
make a donation to your favorite charity in your name?
Earn rewards for referring new customers to itSynergy.
For more details, please
visit here.
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Office Hours: How Bill Gates Uses
Office
Written by William (Bill) H. Gates,
chairman of Microsoft Corporation.
Reprinted with permission from
Microsoft Office.
If
you visit my office, you will probably notice right away that I have
three large flat screen displays that sit together and are synchronized
so they work like a single very wide display. The large display area
enables me to work very efficiently. I keep my Outlook 2007 Inbox open
on the screen to the left so I can see new messages as they come in. I
usually have the message or document that I'm currently reading or
writing in the center screen. The screen on the right is where I have
room to open up a browser or look at a document that someone has sent me
in e-mail.
I spend the majority of my
time communicating with colleagues, customers, and partners. As a
result, Outlook is the application that I use the most. I receive about
100 e-mail messages per day from Microsoft employees, and many more from
customers and partners.
Read more
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Quote of the
month
Executive ability is deciding quickly
and getting someone else to do the work.
John G. Pollard
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7310 North 16th Street,
Suite 130
Phoenix, AZ 85020-8203
Telephone: 602.297.2400
Fax: 602.297.8703
Email:
info@itsynergy.com
www.itsynergy.com
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