They always report the machine already has many virus issues and that the user should install a the advertised removal product but once the user clicks on the pop up they really do have a virus. So far I have seen several iterations and all of them get past both Symantec products and Mcafee. Once the virus is installed a user cant run their real AV product and the software adds itself to startup registry keys and slows internet access and disables the Windows Security Center and many other functions.

The best way to remove it is to boot Windows into Safe Mode and then use a virus removal product. Once that is done you should be fine.

Take note of this article from CNET on the Google China Hack and an IE hole.

I have heard from customers that they didn’t do anything other than open an email from a trusted source (via a Webmail client) and then boom. They had a virus.

Beware.

For any business considering using an SEO service there are a couple of key things they should consider:

Firstly SEO is not an exact science. It is more of a black art, there is no one defined set of rules you can follow, that if you follow them you will get a guaranteed result such as placing top of the search results list for your chosen search engine. You should therefore be aware that any SEO Expert who says they can guarantee this, is perhaps being overly optimistic in their sales pitch.

Now, there is a set of guide lines and generally accepted tasks you must follow to improve your position such as the way you write you copy, the meta tags you use, the landing pages you set up, the inbound links you have from other sites and how important those other sites linking to you are. The differential between a good SEO and a not so good SEO is how they tune these variables and others.

Google et al, do not publish their search algorithms – these are their secret sauce, the same as Coca Cola’s ingredients are not publicly available. Nobody external to these organizations has a true insight to current algorithms. They therefore can only perform the tried and tested techniques to improve position, and stay up to date with the latest information and snippets on how the algorithms might work. As more people do this, the advantage will be diminished for your chosen sector, then the algorithms will need to be tweaked by the search engine to once again differentiate form all the well optimized sites – someone has to be top of the list.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying don’t use SEO – it could be very beneficial but be careful in reviewing who you use, what they say they can achieve and how much you pay.

The first and best test of an SEO experts reputation is by typing SEO consultant or expert into Google and seeing who comes up top. If your intended provider isn’t on the first page, you can probably be sure they aren’t the best at it and someone else may be a better choice…

I actually had a need to use the XP Mode add on to Windows 7 which is available for download for use with the release candidate. Great, a real world need for compatibility and a good test scenario, or so I thought. My problem to be solved was that of running the Juniper Netscreen VPN client which doesn’t support 64 bit operating systems or Windows 7  (first point very frustrating, second point fair enough).

I read the provided documentation and quickly discovered that XP Mode (which is a pre-configured virtual machine containing Windows XP) does not support processors that do not have Intel VT. This I found strange as Virtual PC 2007 SP1 the standalone product does work without Intel VT. For people who don’t believe documentation, I can confirm after installing it all and ignoring what the software developer said,  that it is indeed correct. It really doesn’t work without Intel VT.

My conclusion then is that though XP Mode sounded pretty useful, especially for this kind of issue, it is actually going to be mostly useless to most people. I have 10 PCs available to me and only one has Intel VT support (and that’s because I ensured it did).  My brand new shiny laptop which is mid range is therefore no use to me in supporting legacy apps. So I am back to manually installing Virtual PC 2007 SP1 as I always have to support any legacy requirements. That’s fine for me but much more of a headache for the average IT department that wants to roll our Windows 7 64 Bit but has to support not 64 bit compatible applications.

I realize that more expensive laptops and desktops will support Intel VT and if you want XP Mode you will need to buy one of those, but it seems a little shortsighted not make it work on any hardware platform as initially it sounded like a great idea.

From a business point of view it has never made much sense to me why companies would want to have to buy and support Blackberry Enterprise server software to connect their corporate Blackberry’s to the company Exchange server when you could use a very nice HTC phone coupled with Microsoft Windows Mobile and have it working out of the box in an instant.

I know that Blackberry’s had more features for the Enterprise in the early days like remote wiping of lost phones but Microsoft has added similar functionality in recent times. So I give RIM that advantage, but surprisingly both RIM’s Blackberry OS and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS both got 3 out of 5 this year in the Operating System category. I am definitely not in love with Windows Mobile after using it for a lot of years and am shocked to see then that in  the survey RIM and MS managed only the same rating.

Which brings me back to the iPhone. Never have I purchased such a hyped up device (and I have bought a few duffers in my time) and been so pleased with it and actually found it to be better than I hoped. I waited for the 3G iPhone, not so much for the 3G but because they licensed ActiveSync from Microsoft which allows the iPhone to natively talk to Exchange servers straight out of the box.

As a business tool, the Safari browser, the infinite ways to expand the usage with the iTunes App store and the piece de resistance the email integration with Exchange means this is just a fabulous combination that is truly useful for the individual and the business.

I thoroughly recommend you consider the iPhone when you are next evaluating smart phones for your business or are looking to upgrade. I don’t think you will be disappointed.

For many businesses and particularly the smaller variety, the main consideration in purchasing a new product or system for their IT infrastructure is the initial cost. I was reminded of this when a potential customer asked me whether I could get a discount on some particular hardware and would I be getting it on-line or from a store. These are very fair questions as they will be the ones picking up the tab and as ever, every penny counts. 10% off is 10% off.

The particular problem with this viewpoint is that the hardware in questions may have only cost two or three hundred dollars so a 10% saving (if there was one to be had) doesn’t add up to much. I therefore write this to draw attention back to the total cost of ownership of hardware, software and systems. In hard times the focus is too often on the capital expenditure right now, but if you intend to be in business in 2 years time and still be using today’s investment then you must consider what the ownership costs will be for the product over the life of the purchase.

Lets take a single server running Microsoft Small Business Server 2008 as a simple example. A server like this for a small business might cost $3000. This is where a small business (and sometimes larger ones) seems to focus most of their time on product selection. They may shop around, comparing models, haggle with the supplier and after several days may acquire that server for $2600 as they managed to really beat down the company. Now comes the expensive part. If your core skills are not IT then you will need someone to set the server up, configure it to your requirements and ensure it is working. If this entails email set up, domain names, migration of existing machines and applications, print queues, group policy, patch management, back up and restore, the list goes on, then you may have someone with you for 3 or 4 days at $500 or so per day. Once the server is happily whirring away, you need to figure in electricity costs, management and administration and monitoring. You may pay $400 per month for a basic service support service.

Did you choose hardware support when you bought the server? If you didn’t becuase it was $350 more for 3 years and something fails like a motherboard, you could be out of action for days whilst you get a new one shipped to you and the cost of setting up alternative arrangements during the disaster could easily run into the thousands in consulting time, new emergency hardware and software, etc. If the systems are critical to your business operations, and they normally are, then please factor how much it will cost you whilst they are out of action.

About a year into ownership your business is doing great and you need to upgrade the server and introduce a new application and remote working. Now your initial system still supports all this by getting some add-ons, but once again you will need to dig deep for the software and hardware additions and the services to implement, plus a review of your well documented backup and recovery plans now things have changed. Lets price this at $5000 for the whole shebang.

I am not going to continue with my theoretical business (based on real world) example but your total over two years (assuming the disaster doesn’t strike) would be – $ 19200, of which $2600 was the only part that you got excited about in pricing terms, though it is only 13% of the TCO over a two year time frame. I didn’t account for electricity or AV software or other subscriptions and ongoing costs and assumed that disaster never struck. so the percentage is more likely less than 10%.

So my point. When you decide to implement a new system and especially if it is an infrastructure update, the important factor is ensuring that you plan your system correctly from the ground up and examine the TCO costs rather than just asking how much will so and so be and is it cheaper on Amazon. That $10 saving, though worth having shouldn’t be the “be all and end all” of your system planning and selection process because it is just a drop in the ocean. Time and time again it has been shown that a more expensive implementation, that is planned carefully before product selection takes place (and not just on price), where fault tolerant components are chosen, adequate disaster recovery options are selected and where the systems are standardized, locked down and controlled will reduce your TCO over the long run and mean you pay out less over the lifetime as your business grows more successful.

Very recently Foxmarks has been renamed to XMarks, I assume to better reflect the fact the product can work with other browsers than just FireFox.

I was first introduced to the utility when I become a heavier Firefox user and it solved a problem for me that I am sure many users have. I heavily use Internet Favorites and have a fairly well organized and categorized set of folders and bookmarks. I also have 3 PCs that I use regularly and for reasons I wont bore you with as to why they are not on a domain and I don’t use roaming profiles (which would at least mean IE favorites remained centrally managed) for these systems.

The first thing that is really cool about Xmarks is that you can synchronize your browser favorites and user name and password combinations with the Xmarks server – obviously after considering carefully what types of passwords I want out there! So after doing that you now have an off site central repository for all your bookmarks. If you should then add a second PC to your set up you simply install the Xmarks add on and enter your details and immediately all your internet shortcuts are now on your new PC too. You can repeat this with as many PCs as you would like. You can choose whether to copy over any existing shortcuts on the new PC, or merge the server entires with the local ones, etc.

I also happen to use Internet Explorer a lot and in days gone by I would use the SyncToy utility, free from Microsoft, to ensure my IE Favorites were replicated between PCs. That’s fine, but it doesn’t help me with FireFox. Xmarks also happens to have a version that syncs with IE too. I therefore can ensure my different browsers, even on the same PC and across multiple PCs have the same favorites and if I add, delete or edit one in one place it is changed everywhere else.

Should I ever rebuild or lose my PC (and cant get my hands on an up to date backup!) then I can simply install Xmarks and bam, I have all my favorites back again.

The tool is simple, works great, saves time and effort and is free. I recommend you check out www.xmarks.com  – the latest version does a whole lot more than I have described including allowing you to set up profiles for home and work and how they are replicated.

Check it out – you want be disappointed.

I have been running Windows 7 Beta on my primary business laptop since the download was available. I was fearful that this was going to be another “pigs ear” of an OS like Vista. Now I am one of those people who has persevered with Vista and the experience improved over time; once I turned off the annoying features and found my way round the interface so I could do things my way.

I have met very few people (I can count them on one hand) who actually like Vista and there was good reason for this opinion. It was slow, the interface though pretty initially, was all over the shop, they had moved everything for no good reason and file access was tiresome. That was without talking about the User Account Control and plenty of other annoyances. I found people to be aggressively negative about the product in fact.

So here are a few reasons to get excited:

• Since running Windows 7 I have found that the OS is super fast, even on old hardware with 512MB of RAM – I was really impressed
• The interface has been tightened up and greatly improved and I find it much easy to achieve tasks and just get around
• The product fits together much better overall, just like XP does and support for devices and software is great (the ones I use)
• It is good looking and you wont be quite as envious of the Mac user sitting next to you in Starbucks

From a business point of view, this is the release that Vista should have been, and I don’t think there is any reason not to adopt it quickly. There will be a learning curve for users as the interface is significantly different to XP and at the back end if you are deploying it and managing it using Active Directory and group policies the features and items you can control centrally just keeps growing, which is good of course but means more effort to tune it to your particular needs. Still out of the box it is far more secure, stable and complete.

Being in the business of helping companies deploy technology and in particular Microsoft infrastructure , I have felt a large hole in my business because I havent come across anyone who wanted to roll the product out. I know some companies have, but I feel they are few and far between. I have a 1000 seat plus financial services customer who is about to roll out Windows XP for the third time. The last two roll outs have been whilst Vista has been available! They have chosen to do a new OS software refresh with everything but the OS being refreshed!

I am sure we are not the only IT services company missing out on these projects, before it felt like a conveyor belt that always turned on time, Windows 95/ 3.11 to NT4, NT4 to Windows 2000, Windows 2000 to XP and then it all stopped.

With the current economic crisis still taking it’s toll, businesses starting to perform hardware and software rerfreshes to their user base would be great for everyone concerned and that is why Windows 7 cant come soon enough.

I will be talking about particular Windows 7  features in future entries.

My point is, that this highlights a consideration when choosing “cloud” computing services or “web hosted applications” as we called it not very long ago. It should always be weighed in the pros and cons, that  when choosing a service or application that is outside your direct control or the that of the company, you share twin risks. The security of your data and the availability of the aforementioned. Obviously there are usually lots of pros, including availability anywhere with Internet access, price, lower ongoing costs.

So back to the cons – it should be said that if you do put data in the cloud then consider firstly the sensitivity of your data and how well protected it is and if it meets your company’s security standards. You should go through strict evaluation and request technical details of how the service will protect your data.

From the availability standpoint, I am fairly confident that 24 x 7 availability metrics of these hosted services will be at least as good as your business can deliver and that’s if you are a very large, deep pocketed corporate. If you aren’t then 99% or 99.9% availability will be a good and realistic achievement. Now, I have experienced system issues with certain suppliers of hosted email in the past and in that customer’s case we had to move from the provider to internal systems and so far (touch wood) it has worked out better, but I don’t believe this to be the norm.

Saying that, I have moved my own business email out to Microsoft hosted Online services as I like to eat the cake I am serving up and so far it tastes good!

Part 6 – Alternatives to the Norm

For my last entry in the series on Cutting IT Costs I want to talk about “alternative products”. By this I mean, alternatives to the de facto standards that most businesses would default their product choices to.

The alternatives are generally a lot cheaper or free to acquire and that can make a big difference to capital budgets. Just remember, the acquisition price isn’t always the largest part of the total cost – your business needs to evaluate how much the product is going to cost you over it’s lifetime and this calculation needs to take in deployment costs, maintenance costs (which may be charged by the vendor), management costs and support costs.

A Comparison

For example Microsoft Office is not the only option for a business these days when it comes to office productivity tools. OpenOffice (and the many flavors that are derived from its code base) is a free alternative to Microsoft Office that provides similar functionality to Word, Excel etc. It is a no brainer that it present s a significant saving per user for any business and it has all the applications you would expect. It would be unfair to say the product is functionally identical to MS Office however, and anyone who is used to specific features of MS Office may require some time to get used to the new product or the lack of a key component that they used everyday. The temporary loss of productivity needs to be considered.

Google Apps also provide tools that are free and require zero installation, however functionality compared to Microsoft offerings is limited. Then again, what do you want for free. There is the old argument that 80% of users only use 20% of the features in MS Office so for your particular needs, it may be met by Google Apps or more likely OpenOffice. I heartily recommend a pilot project to evaluate how users will get on day to day.

A big consideration for me is how you communicate and share information with suppliers or customers. If your business only ever sends out PDFs to customers and suppliers then OpenOffice could be perfect for you, but if you collaborate with other businesses and they use Microsoft apps then you have a little more work to do because OpenOffice cannot save in Office 2007 formats (though it can read them).

I definitely think both products have a place and for any company that is looking to upgrade their office suite and is tight on cash, free makes a lot of sense.

Not Free, But Better Value

I’m actually get excited by some product offerings that offer the alternative and do things in better ways and still work out cheaper. My favorite is an old one but more relevant today than ever. That is Faxing! I still cant get over that so many people want to fax and the only choice for dealing with them is still by fax. Online fax services win for me in multiple ways. Firstly, I don’t have to have a dedicated line for a fax machine (for which I use once in a blue moon), second, I don’t have to own a fax machine, third I don’t have to buy consumables for that fax machine that I don’t have and finally I am desperately trying to operate a paperless office and I scan everything. Having to print a fax out then scan and throw the paper away is sacrilege . Instead I spend $7 per month (and there are free ones) and have my faxes go to and from my inbox with no hardcopies in between. It costs much less than the phone company would charge for a second line.

Here are a few others (I am aware that there are hundreds of free applications to replace paid for versions):

1. Skype – No phone line costs, free Skype to Skype calls and you can have a “call as much as you like plan” for $1.50 per month

2. Bullzip PDF – Converts printouts to PDFs at no cost – instead of printing documents just send them to the PDF Printer object and it will save them to a folder where you can view with Acrobat Reader (less paper again)

3. Hosted Exchange – Mailboxes for around $10 per month with all the features of the server product but with none of the hassle.

Remember free isn’t always free and the important thing is that the application or tool doesn’t hinder productivity and doing business, then you may find free costs more than the Rolls Royce version.

Part 5 - Outsource IT or parts of it

Outsourcing is probably a dirty word to some, especially when it is referring to jobs being sent overseas. That is not what I am referring to here, though it is difficult to know where the employees are if you use a large corporations services. I am talking about outsourcing either components of your system or perhaps all of it, but in the case of all of it, it should be done in a considered way or it may not work for you.

Partial Outsourcing

The first type of outsourcing I want to cover from a perspective of saving money is that of outsourcing one or more components – which could be an application or service that you currently run in house but could be done better by partners, either because it is not your core competency or it simply can be done cheaper in an alternative fashion.

My favorite current example of a component of IT being outsourced is that of email and in particular Microsoft Exchange. First of all, Exchange is a fabulous product that has been one of Microsoft’s best over the long haul and I have been involved in many implementations over the years and have never had a customer unhappy with the product or delivery. However, Exchange is a complicated product that requires continuous management and maintenance performed by someone with good messaging skills – there is more to it than meets the eye.

So consider this, even in the smallest organization, say with 5 users all with mailboxes, all requiring calendaring, contacts, tasks etc, the cheapest way to have the benefits of MS Exchange is probably to buy Small Business Server and a basic piece of hardware. Now the cheapest server with SBS 2008 costs around $3000 in the box, and that doesn’t include setup, backup and restore or anything else. Once it is in and all up and running, you then have the ongoing management costs, the upgrades, the electricity, etc.

Microsoft also provides Exchange via their Online Services (as do others but I haven’t been impressed by several other offerings I have tested) and for around $40 per month you can get your 5 mailboxes, the exact same benefits but literally none of the other costs from purchasing to managing and maintaining. You could enjoy the same features using the online edition for 6 years before it will cost you more than the initial outlay for hardware and software for your own internal version. To me that makes economic sense for any small or medium business.

The decision point as to whether it is relevant to you will be the number of users you have as there is a cross over point where it may not be so viable but I believe this could be a very high number in the thousands due to the increased levels of hardware and software you need to support big installations. Also for consideration is whether you use the server for other tasks. SBS will definitely provide other benefits that make it cost effective, as the server in a small environment will be performing multiple roles. Once you have Exchange on its own server the online version works out even better. I would love to see many companies taking advantage of this and having a professional email domain name to go along with it!

Total Outsourcing

Total outsourcing or outsourcing your entire IT operation provides definite savings if managed correctly. By removing your employee costs (and maybe re-allocating them to business growth tasks) and moving to a fixed cost contract you can save a large amount of money per year. A fixed cost contract means no more payroll, no more benefit expenses, no more overtime when the servers go down at 6pm on a Friday and instead hopefully a team of people who specialize in running IT for a business as their main task. They will have the procedures and skills in place to deliver a consistent security baseline, alert you to issues before they occur and be able to present to you improvements as technology develops and becomes relevant to you.

Here are a couple of thoughts:

1. If you do outsource, consider that local outsourcing is the way to go as you need to know that the company will have people on the ground to understand your environment and service needs quickly in the event of a problem - also the IT team external or otherwise is a key function of your business and knowing who they are is critical for success.

2. Key to saving with outsourcing is ensuring your IT house is in order before committing to a relationship, otherwise your fixed cost quickly becomes very variable. By this, I mean that if your systems are not standardized and rationalized first and you just handover a mess, then you are going to endure ongoing issues that will generate additional charges on top of the standard rates. Systems should already be built to a well documented standard then the outsourcer will only have to perform to the contract rather than performing continual ongoing fix projects. It is these fix projects that generate the extra fees and all of a sudden make outsourcing less effective.

Now for the shameless plug – Squeeze Technology (www.squeezetech.com) can hook you up with either of these options if you so wish and can help you evaluate which is more beneficial to you, as always, these are multi-faceted issues.