John joins Dan and Jaimee who many of you know to bring our outside sales staff up to 3 individuals and further accelerate our growth.

Also, we have already heard from many of our customers how happy they are to have Mark back in day to day client interactions, and they are looking forward to once again having access to his expertise.

I've said it in this newsletter in the past: it is those companies that act aggressively now that will come out on top as we emerge from this recession. Those who know me know I am a BIG believer in practicing what I preach, and our staffing moves during the past month prove it.

Have a great month!

Essential Keys to Successful IT Projects
reprinted with permission from the HP Small Business Center

"These numbers represent a downtick in the success rates from the previous study, as well as a significant increase in the number of failures," says Jim Crear, Standish Group CIO. "They are a low point in the last five study periods. This year's results represent the highest failure rate in over a decade."

Some experts and analysts have disputed the accuracy of these statistics, but there are few who would argue that the use of basic project management best practices can help ensure that IT projects don't end up in the bin. Here, some simple points to keep in mind.

How to Boost your Creativity at Work
reprinted with permission from HP Small Business Center

When you think of "creativity", you might immediately think of artists, musicians or designers. But the fact is that creativity is a useful tool in all sorts of occupations, from accounting to engineering to teaching. Creativity is the fuel for new products, systems, and better ways of getting work done.

According to Dr. Warren Bennis, a respected American scholar, organizational consultant and an expert in the field of leadership studies, "The organizations of the future will increasingly depend on the creativity of their members to survive. And the leaders of those organizations will be those who find ways both to retain their talented and independent-minded staffs and to set them free to do their best, most imaginative work... In a truly creative collaboration, work is pleasure, and the only rules and procedures are those that advance the common cause."

The value of developing and encouraging creativity in the workplace is clear. But how can you boost your creative contributions? Here are a few techniques you may want to try.

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.

You know you're backing up, but are you ready for a disaster?

Lately, we've come across a lot of systems for new customers that had some type of backup in place, however the data being backed up was only a portion of the server's hard drives containing actual user data. While this can help to recover that data, in the event of some type of disaster that destroys the server, this can leave you in a BAD spot from a disaster recovery point of view.

There are two primary considerations when it comes to backup - Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). RTO is how long between the time when you realize there has been a data loss and the data gets recovered. RPO is what point in time the data is recovered from. Let's say you walk in Monday morning and find the server has been stolen/burned/water damaged/whatever. The current backup strategy is to only capture a small subset of data. That means your RPO in this case would probably be Thursday or Friday night (depending on when the damage happened). Your RTO would be fairly long, however, as you'd first have to get new hardware, then install an operating system, then reinstall all of your programs, then restore the data. At best, the business is probably down for days, and at worst it might be weeks. Also, you'd NEVER get some of your data back.

The point here is simply not to be lulled into a false sense of security. We don't actually advocate a particular backup strategy, we view our role as simply being to provide you with all of the information you need to make an informed decision about the level of risk you are willing to accept. Without looking at the COMPLETE picture of not just backup, but also disaster recovery, you aren't considering all of the factors.

August 2009
In this issue

 □  Welcome
 □  Successful IT Projects
 □  Boost Your Creativity
 □  Engineering Corner
 □  Referral Program
 □  Format Painter

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.

Copy Formatting in a Single Click with Format Painter

There are many ways to customize the format of text and graphics in Microsoft Office. You can change font style and color, add borders and shading, and so on. And once you've created a format that you like, you don't have to repeat all those steps each time you want to use that format. Instead, Microsoft Office programs offer a quick way to copy formatting from one item - such as text in Word, a cell in Excel, a control in Access, or a shape in Publisher - to another. It's called Format Painter, and it might be the most helpful toolbar button you've never used.

Watch the demo to see how it works.

Quote of the month

"Social Notworking" -
The art of using Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter during work hours.

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