Applied Integration Inc - December 2009 Email

From Don's Desk:

First and foremost, I want to thank you for your business. I spend most of my waking hours (and some non-waking) focused on technology. There's nothing more gratifying, to me, than utilizing technology to help my clients save money, prevent problems, and most importantly -- to bolster their business. We know you have many vendor choices, and I thank you for choosing Applied Integration as your technology partner. Although 2009 has been a rough one for most of us, I am sincerely looking forward to starting 2010 off with a renewed sense of optimism.

As you know, it’s the time of year that companies like ours review support and maintenance pricing and make adjustments for the coming year. However, with the business still being challenging for so many of you, we have adjusted our internal budget so that we can maintain our current pricing for the time being, with NO increase at this time. We’re going to hold the line for now, and review the situation in six months.

Looking Ahead:

One lesson I think we’ve all learned in the last couple years is that we can’t afford to rest on our laurels or just keep on doing what we’ve been doing, hoping we’ll survive. I think each of us must be taking a look at just about everything we do, and making sure it’s the right thing, the right use of our people, and the right way to take care of our customers.

As always, I encourage you to look, with a critical eye, at your current technology situation. In most cases, you can save money while increasing efficiency and better protecting your critical data and systems. If you’d like a no-charge technology analysis, please respond to my email above and we’ll get it scheduled. Often times, it’s not about doing or spending more, it’s about doing things differently and better utilizing some incredible, and low-cost, innovations.

Autotask - Helping Us Serve You Better:

If you’ve opened many support calls with us over the past year, you’ve no doubt been aware of the changes we made to our call tracking system. We started out with a pretty simple system that worked well enough for what it did, but we soon found that we really needed much more than just a simple call tracking system, so late in the year we did our own “go-live” as we migrated to a fully integrated application called Autotask. This new application does all that we need it to for call tracking, but behind the scenes it helps us be more effective by putting everything under one application. We now have one place where we archive everything about your systems, all your hardware components, all your contact information, your Service Contracts, you name it... we now keep it in one place. For the most part, what you’ll see is the call tracking features, but internally, we’re much more efficient with this new technology which helps heighten the service we provide to you.

The most important things you’re seeing are the options you now have for opening support calls, you can visit the web portal and open a ticket there, or you can send an email to helpdesk@appliedintegration.net and the system will open a ticket for you. I have found that some of you missed the initial email from our system that included your login credentials for the web portal, maybe it got into your junkmail folder or you just didn’t realize what it was and deleted it. If you don’t know how to get to the portal, feel free to give me a call or send me an email and I’ll make sure we get you in there. If you have other people in your company that you want to allow access to, just let me know about them and we’ll get them setup right away too.

Again, thank you for your business, and here’s to 2010 and the potential it brings!

Date: April 30th 2009

Links to Our Site

Conflicker - April Fools Day Virus

Well, if you believed the hype about this one, April Fools Day this year was supposed to see the Internet brought to a screaching halt as millions of Infected PCs came to life and started a series of Denial of Service attacks. In actuality, other than a few notable exceptions, most people and organizations had plenty of time to get ahead of this one and there were no major problems. We stay tightly in the loop here with our major security partner Symantec, and were already certain that the Servers and PC's we monitor and maintain were protected. We did however still come in to work a bit early on April 1st, just to keep tabs on things.

The media frenzy created over this particular incident, while a bit sensational, has served to once again bring the issue of Security up onto the "radar screen" of just about everyone, and that's never a bad thing. The landscape is always changing, and I don't think we'll ever be able to stop being vigilant and well informed. You've no doubt seen the recent explosion in "Web 2.0" social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, and you've probably heard about how some of these sites have already been exploited.

What we should take away from April Fools Day this year are some important reminders. First, if your IT resources aren't covered by a reliable, state of the art anti-virus application that is regularly updated and that enforces some realistic security policies (and I don't mean some free thing you downloaded off the Internet), you may be putting the stability of the systems your people rely on at risk.

Second, if you haven't spelled out at least a basic "acceptable use" policy that you have put in the hands of your users, you should do that immediately. Don't assume your folks know what you consider to be appropriate use of the Internet and Email, spell it out and make sure they know.

And lastly, if you need help with any or all of this process, just give me a call. I know you probably have plenty of things to fill your day without taking time to read security bulletins, software update notifications and such, but that's some of what we do each and every day here. Don't forget that partnering up with us let's you "bolt-on" a fully functional, highly focused IT department. I know you know to call us when something goes wrong, but I also want to make sure you know that you can call us to make sure something DOESN'T go wrong!

Tell a friend

I think it never hurts to remind folks of the value of an honest compliment, and the highest compliment we can recieve is that of a referral from an existing customer. The things we do for your company, keeping your systems running smoothly, securing and maintaining your complex systems, hosting your email and websites, are all things that we can do for lots of companies just like yours, even those that might not be in the same exact line of business as you. When you bump into folks in your circle of peers and partners that might be a good candidate for our services, I hope you'll help us spread the word.

Our growing customer base means our combined volume with our vendors earns us extremely competitive pricing on all sorts of hardware and software, from the basic PC workstation, all the way up to the high end Servers. When things come up that you need for your systems, don't forget that we're here and that we might just be your best source for getting the absolute right stuff at very competitive prices. Remember, no one has a more vested interest in your success than we do, we will make sure you get the right gear to do the job, and that it fits well into your overall system.