VMWare offers VMWare Fusion Pro 4 software for those business and home Mac users who want to virtualize Windows 7 on their Macs. You can try it out for 30 days. If you like it, you can buy the license for approximately $200.

Oracle makes VirtualBox for x86 or AMD64/Intel 64 hardware. This free open source software is good for both home and business use. One caveat:  Your machine may be inadequate to handle Oracle’s power.

For 14 days, you can try Parallels Desktop 7. This software allows users to run multiple operating systems on one machine simultaneously and switch back and forth between them. If you like it, you can buy the license for roughly $80.

Another option is to use Apple’s Boot Camp. This may be the best option, especially for those on a budget. Boot Camp is included with all Apple computers, so there’s nothing extra to pay. Once you’ve configured Boot Camp in your computer, you can boot up your Mac from your Windows setup CD and then install Windows 7 on the new partition you’ve created.

Switching from a PC to a Mac doesn’t have to mean giving up using Windows 7. Of course, your budget, the type of computer you have and your needs will factor largely in your decision to either use one of the aforementioned softwares or simply take the time to configure Boot Camp.

Why are small businesses easier to infiltrate? They tend to have fewer safeguards in place than larger enterprises. Small-business owners erroneously believe that because they have fewer clients and therefore less data to compromise, they offer little enticement for cyber thieves. On the contrary, because cyber criminals can penetrate small businesses’ systems more easily, they will hit several small businesses in the same amount of time that it would take them to get past all the security measures of a large enterprise.

Email is still the most common form of communication used in business. Hackers know this and will use email to infiltrate a company’s system. They can do this via tainted attachments or hyperlinks. Other, bolder criminals will call or visit a business pretending to be network administrators or representatives from a security firm. Teach your employees how to recognize when someone is on a phishing expedition. One mistake could ruin your business and your reputation.

Data security is paramount to the success of your business. You are responsible for protecting your clients’ information. If their credit card information gets stolen because a hacker infiltrated your system, even if their credit card companies don’t make them pay for the fraudulent purchases, they will still blame you. Trust is one of the most valuable things you can get from your clients. Once that’s lost, it’s almost impossible to get back. In fact, some clients will never put their trust in you again. And they certainly won’t be referring any of their friends or colleagues to you. So, not only have you lost current business but also future business.

Besides making sure you install firewalls and update security software programs regularly, establish best practices for you and your employees to follow. Use complicated passwords that use numbers, symbols and capital letters. This makes them tougher to guess. Complicated passwords are also tougher to remember, so keep them written down in a small notebook that it’s store away from the computer. Change login passwords about once a month. Also, teach your employees how to recognize suspicious emails. To make it easier for people to remember to follow these best practices, you could post them in the break room and above copiers and fax machines. When it comes to recognizing suspicious callers or visitors, you could run regular drills. You could make them fun by offering a prize to the person who “catches” the most suspicious visitors. Or you could divide your employees into teams, depending on how many you have. Gift cards or branded merchandise could be offered as prizes.

You really can’t take too many precautions when it comes to protecting your company data. Your clients rely on you to keep them protected from cyber criminals, too, so anything you do to protect your business also protects your clients.

Looking for a trusted IT security firm to help you protect your business information and data?  Call us today.

With Microsoft’s Big Easy offer, small-business owners can receive partner subsidy dollars when they buy or renew current eligible open software agreements. Business owners can save 15% off Microsoft’s estimated retail price in subsidy dollars for single products or 20% off when purchasing two or more eligible products.

Although there’s still plenty of time for small-business owners to take advantage of this special deal, it won’t last forever. The offer ends March 31, 2012. Eligible products are Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft Exchange 2010, Windows Server 2008 R2, Small-Business Server 2011, Microsoft Lync 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

Special savings aren’t the only reason why now is a good time to upgrade. Support for Office 2003, Windows XP and Exchange 2003 is ending. If small-business owners have computers that are still running the software after April 8, 2014, they can expect to receive no more new security updates, non-security hotfixes or free paid assisted support options or online technical content updates.

They have until July 14, 2015 for Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 SP2 Extended Support. They can learn more by visiting Microsoft’s blog.

Change can be scary and frustrating, but it’s a part of life. Those small-business owners who want to succeed in their industries need to stay current with the latest technological advances. The chance to save 15% or 20% in the process should make the decision that much easier.

According to Microsoft, despite being server only, clients will be able to access ReFS stored data. The new system has an NTFS base with new architecture and engineering that will accommodate 21^st century “storage technologies and scenarios.”

The NTFS semantics and features that ReFS won’t support are named streams, object IDs, short names, compression, file level encryption (EFS), user data transactions, sparse, hard-links, extended attributes and quotas.

Although ReFS and Storage Spaces can run independently of each other, Microsoft expects a lot of customers to use them in conjunction with each other. When customers use ReFS in conjunction with mirrored Storage Spaces, corruptions will be fixed automatically and transparently. Microsoft has also devised a way to deal with “bit rot,” which happens when parts of the disk develop corruptions over time that tend to go undetected because those parts aren’t often read.

“In order to deal with bit rot, we have added a system task that periodically scrubs all metadata and Integrity Stream data on an ReFS volume residing on a mirrored Storage Space,” said Surendra Verma, a Microsoft development manager on the storage and file system team. “Scrubbing involves reading all the redundant copies and validating their correctness using the ReFS checksums. If checksums mismatch, bad copies are fixed using good ones.”

Microsoft has several goals it hopes to achieve with ReFS such as verify and auto-correct data, optimize for extreme scale and never take the file system offline.

It may be more than a year before ReFS is ready to be used by the average consumer. In the meantime, anyone who is interested in learning more about it can do so on Microsoft’s MSDN blog.

The first step toward an effective e-newsletter campaign is identifying your target audience.

• What kind of product do you sell, or what kind of service do you provide?
• Are your customers businesses or individuals?
• If individuals, do you have a target age demographic or socioeconomic demographic?
• If businesses are your customers, what’s your industry focus?

All of these things and more need to be considered before you do anything else.

The next thing you need to consider is the goal of your newsletter. Do you want to cultivate new clients or retain current clients? Maybe you’d like to send out a newsletter that will interest new clients and while simultaneously helping you retain current clients. Another option is to have two separate newsletters. Depending on your budget, this could be a viable option.

There are several other things to consider before embarking on an email newsletter campaign, but those first steps are the most important. Now, it’s time to start thinking about the newsletter itself.

You can find templates online that facilitate creating attractive newsletters than won’t get relegated to junk status by spam filters. You can help that by creating a subject line for your e-newsletter that is not only more likely to get it delivered to your recipient’s inbox but also more likely to get it opened. If you include several articles in your e-newsletter, using a headline from one that is particularly relevant to your target audience is a good way to increase the odds that your e-newsletter will be opened.

Relevant content isn’t content that talks solely about your company’s products or services. This type of newsletter could end up being marked as spam by the recipient and then deleted. Relevant content is anything that your target audience might find interesting such as tips, current trends, interesting facts, etc. And advertising should be kept to a minimum and in the margins.

Formatting is also essential to an effective e-newsletter campaign.

• Short sentences and paragraphs are easier to read, as are bullets.
• Pictures help break up the monotony of text.
• A consistent font style will make your newsletter more attractive and give it a professional appearance. If you decide to use different fonts, it’s a good idea to use no more than two.

Some newsletters only have the introductory paragraphs of articles followed by links that lead to the companies’ websites for the rest. Make sure these links go where they’re supposed to go. Also check any links that appear in the body of full-length articles. The last – and probably most important – link to check is the unsubscribe link at the bottom of your newsletter. This one must work, and it must be included in every e-newsletter you send. One thing you don’t want to do is turn people off by denying them the option to unsubscribe.

When all of your preparations have been completed, email your newsletter to yourself. It’s a good idea to have Outlook, Apple, Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts because they are the most commonly used. This will give you some idea how your e-newsletter will look to recipients when they open it.

A lot goes into creating an effective e-newsletter campaign. With the right preparations, you could create an email newsletter that keeps your business thriving – and growing – for years to come.

Just like creating an awesome newsletter for your business, you need to have the right team of IT service professionals taking care of you…trust us to help you with all your IT service needs.