Regional RE-Views, the official newsletter of the Palm Beach County Regional MLS, was forwarded us to by a colleague who works for a local luxury real estate broker. The article talks about the limited real estate functionality in the base iPad.

Apple iPad as Mobile Device Limited by Lack of IE

The Apple iPad is an amazing device with loads of flexibility and a wow factor that should not be underestimated in listing presentations. On it you can store home photos, virtual tours, videos, brochures, live maps and many other materials regularly presented to clients. Unfortunately, the Palm Beach County Regional Multiple Listing Service (MLS) doesn’t allow access from anything other than Microsoft Internet Explorer.

That the iPad runs the Safari browser exclusively seems to make the iPad a non-starter according to the trade publication. After all, if you can’t access the MLS with the iPad, it is far more anchor than sail.

Many Web Sites Require Internet Explorer

While the world wide web was designed with open standards and general interoperability in mind, some web sites were designed specifically for and only allow access from Microsoft Internet Explorer. This has been a problem for years for people with Apple or Linux computers. By designing a web site specifically for one browser and one operating system, you are limiting the number of potential visitors. Many of the roadblocks mentioned in the real estate trade publication can be bypassed using a Citrix solution.

HostMyIT Brings Microsoft IE8 to iPad

Fortunately, DedicatedIT has a method for bringing Microsoft Internet Explorer to the Apple iPad: our cloud / hosted infrastructure solution, HostMyIT.

• Nearly any device (iPad, iPhone, Android, laptop, PC or Mac) can access a full suite of applications – even if they aren’t able to be installed or run natively from that device.
• Your business will no longer need a server of its own.
• Employees can work from anywhere with full functionality.
• Never worry about backing up or hurricane preparation as they relate to IT again.

Here is what one of our clients said the first time he used it:

Live IE8 Trial from the Apple iPad

Waterfront Properties and Club Communities, a luxury real estate brokerage in Jupiter, FL was an early iPad adopter. They have a WiFi model, two 3G models and are looking at more.

“The inability to access the Regional MLS data from the iPad was a speed bump for us,” said Matthew Steinhoff, the Waterfront Project Manager. “Fortunately, DedicatedIT was able to quickly craft a Citrix solution. With IE8 running on the iPad, there is no reason why it can’t replace a netbook or laptop mobile use and for presentations. Accessing the RMLS through Citrix on the iPad is transparent.”

I have AVG/Symantec/Mcafee/Spybot Installed. I’m Protected, Right?

Recently, I had an alarm installed at my house. When the ADT fellow showed me the brochure, there were three different levels I could choose from: not expensive, expensive and OH MY G-D!

The differences between the systems were:

• Level 1 – door sensors
• Level 2 – door sensors and window sensors
• Level 3 – door sensors, window sensors, cameras and biometric fingerprint scanners

Price is not a factor when choosing Virus and Malware Protection

Unlike alarm systems for your house, most antivirus software are priced similarly.  With price being a non-factor, the quality of the software becomes the most important part of the decision.

We look for the following qualities (in order of importance):

1. Ability to catch and prevent infection
2. Ability to clean up existing infections
3. Low impact to system performance
4. Centralized management console
5. Easy – set it up and then forget about it

AVG and Symantec Fail Miserably

About a year ago, we lost respect for the Symantec solution. [Note: we are Symantec partners and have been for many years.] Their antivirus software used to be the best thing out there. Not so much any more. Shortly after pitching Symantec aside we began recommending AVG, because it was free and did a better job than Symantec.

About six months ago, we standardized on Sunbelt VIPRE Enterprise. WOW. Let me tell you how awesome it is to have a solution you really believe in and proves itself every day.[Note: we do make money selling VIPRE. However, we could make money selling any of the solutions out in the market.]

Doctors Office Installs VIPRE and finds 12 Infections AVG did not

Just yesterday I spent the day uninstalling AVG and Symantec at a doctors office and replacing it with VIPRE. Within an hour of the first scan being completed, VIPRE had detected and removed 12 different infections.

Makes you wonder….Which system did you choose and was it the right choice?

Palm Beach Computer Network Support

DedicatedIT, Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie’s premier network support company, is very proud to be a sponsor of the 34th annual Shamrock race.

We will be streaming live video during the race. Tell your friends and family who don’t want to get up early and drive over to John Prince Park on March 14 to visit this site to keep updated with your status.

Live TV : Ustream

Who is DedicatedIT?

Aside from being avid runners and triathletes ourselves (we even have an Ironman on staff), DedicatedIT provides network support services to South Florida small businesses with 10 to 150 employees.

We specialize in the following fields:

• Attorneys / Law Offices – Firms with 10 to 50 employees
• Engineering and Planning – We know how to keep CAD systems running
• Manufacturing and Wholesale – Firms with locations throughout the world

We are different because:

• Unlimited-use agreements with no hourly billing.
• We monitor your systems 24x7x365 for small problems and fix them.
• We show up when we say we will.

If you are a small firm that fits into any of these classifications, please take a look at our most popular support plan and then give us a call.

DedicatedIT will be indulging its artistic side this weekend at the 16^th Annual Lake Worth Street Painting Festival being held on February 20^th and 21^st. This event is the country’s largest with more than 200 street paintings and covering more area than any other festival of its kind in the United States.  It’s a non-profit event that provides scholarships to graduating Palm Beach County students and supports other community art projects…. and it is just a great way to get out and enjoy the South Florida air.

Computer Network Support Company is a Sponsor for 3rd Year

This will be the third year that DedicatedIT has been one of the “square” sponsors. A “square” is the space allotted to each artist to create a chalk painting on the pavement. DedicatedIT is bringing in Marty Riley, a Missouri artist, to produce an original art work again this year. This is Marty’s 3^rd year being DedicatedIT‘s artist.

[We think the Midwest winter has something to do with her decision to head south each February at the request of her nephew, Adam Steinhoff, President and CEO of DedicatedIT.]

Several streets in Lake Worth will be closed for the event to allow artists to use the pavement as their canvas.  This allows everyone to walk around, view the artwork in progress and have a chance to meet and talk with everyone. Besides the interesting artwork, there will be strolling musicians and as many street side cafes as you would find at a good-sized county fair. Bring the whole family… even the dog. This weekend’s weather should be perfect: not too hot and no rain in the forecast.

Meet Your Network Support Engineers

Stop by the DedicatedIT square on Lake Avenue, between L and M Streets in Lake Worth, between 10 AM and 6 PM on Saturday and Sunday to watch Marty create art for DedicatedIT.

Introduce yourself to the folks from DedicatedIT. We look forward to putting names with faces.

Feel free to give Adam Steinhoff a call on his cell phone. His cell phone number is 561-719-6079. He will be happy to provide directions (in addition to frosty beverages when he sees you).

Lots of Photos

Here are some photos from previous years:

2008 Lake Worth Street Painting Festival Photos

2009 Lake Worth Street Painting Festival Photos

What is the one thing that you do that gives you that little tingle of satisfaction in your brain?

For our General Manager, Scott Maulsby, it is checking an item off his list of things to do for the day. Our bookkeeper, Lila Steinhoff, loves it when the checking account balances at the end of the month.

Our technicians get that little twinge of brain satisfaction when they fix a problem that no one else could.

What Happens in the Mind of a Network Support Technician?

We love a challenge. There is nothing better than a person coming to one of our techs with a problem that “no one else has been able to fix”. We eat up that stuff.

Try this out the next time your home computer isn’t working and your technical friend isn’t very motivated to fix it for you: Tell your friend that you gave your computer to three other technicians (even if you haven’t), and they said it was impossible to fix.

I bet it is fixed before the end of the day.

We’re On your Network Server and Workstation Problems like a Pack of Wild Dogs

Because DedicatedIT’s staff loves a challenge and gets immense pleasure from fixing ‘impossible’ computer problems, we seek out broken networks. We love it when we land a new South Florida small business client and their network is in shambles.

We begin by performing an onsite assessment of your network and log as many as a hundred service tickets for things that need repair. We classify them based on their priority and their impact to your business.

Then, we do what we do best: find problems and fix them.

The benefit to your small business is two-fold:

• Your network becomes more stable as we search for and fix problems. The longer you are with DedicatedIT, the fewer problems you will have. Guaranteed.
• Because you are on a fixed-free, unlimited support contract, you are not paying by the hour. We fix everything we can because it benefits both companies to provide you the most stable network possible. (That, and we really do love this stuff.)

What’s Better than Fixing Computer Network Problems?

Getting responses like these to our “how’d we do” emails that go out after we close a ticket:

• Great job. Fast, knowledgeable, efficient. Not afraid to get one’s hands dirty. Thanks.
• My computer is working good, and it was fixed in good time. thank you.
• All better, thanks guys. Great job as always.
• Terrific! Thanks Ben!!!!
• Awesome once again!
• Great!
• Great, thank you.
• You guys are awesome!
• I wasn’t here for the final fix but it’s working now; thanks guys!
• Thank YOU so much for your immediate response and stellar “find” Friday evening. For all you do, thank you again.

And, these are just from the past three weeks.

Have a Computer Network in South Florida that is in Shambles?

Here is a comment we recently received from a client we picked up about a month ago.

I should win the monthly prize for having the most tickets in such a short time. My concerns of years of neglect and mass disorganization of our systems are being confirmed. Ben’s doing a great job. — George

Do what George did and call DedicatedIT today. We will handle anything you throw at us.

Mention this blog post when you setup a meeting with one of our account managers, and we’ll send a technician with them to provide a no-cost network assessment. (Normally valued at $400.)

You hear about the importance of patching your systems on a regular basis. Occasionally, you hear about people who got a virus because they didn’t patch theirs. What you don’t hear about very often are strong, concerted efforts at hacking into massive amounts of systems… even less often, that it actually worked, and it was Google that fell prey.

“Based upon our investigations, we have determined that Internet Explorer was one of the vectors used in targeted and sophisticated attacks against Google and possibly other corporate networks,” Reavey wrote.

You may be asking yourself why a Google employee would be using anything other than Google Chrome as their browser. Smart web companies utilize many different browsers to ensure that their website will display properly to the many different visitors and their different browers.

Many names: Aurora, Google Attack, IE Vulnerability

There are many security vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer. You may have heard of this one referred to as ‘Aurora’, ‘Google Attacks’ and/or the ‘Microsoft IE Vulnerability (MS Advisory 979352)’.

Hydraq is a malware trojan designed to take advantage of this unpatched vulnerability in Internet Explorer. Its purpose is to attack large enterprises and acquire large amounts of intellectual property. According to Symantec’s Security Response website , this trojan opens a back door that allows a remote attacker to perform actions on a compromised computer. Here is a small list of what it can do:

• Adjust token privileges.
• Check status of, control, and end processes and services.
• Download a remote file, save it as %Temp%\mdm.exe, and then execute it.
• Create, modify, and delete registry subkeys.
• Read, write, execute, copy, change attributes, and delete files.
• Shut down and restart the computer.
• Clear all system event logs.

This trojan is different in that you be infected by just visiting a website. It can be a standard looking website – maybe even a blog like this one. Symantec Security Response has already found dozens of websites that include the attack code, and more are surely going to be coming online.

Security firm Websense has published an article with some of the instant messages and email messages that have been making their way around the Internet.

The China Connection

According to a  New York Times article, evidence has been found that Chinese hackers may have had a hand in the exploit code.

“If you look at the code in a debugger you see patterns that jump out at you,” he said. In this case he discovered software code that represented an unusual algorithm, or formula, intended for error-checking transmitted data.

The error-checking code mentioned above has only been published exclusively on Chinese-language websites.

Protect your South Florida Small Business Computer Network

Our advice:  Keep your Windows Operating System, Antivirus and Antispyware programs updated regularly. Don’t open email attachments that seem suspicious. If,  when visiting a website, you receive a pop up message from an anti-virus application that you’ve never heard of and didn’t install yourself, ignore it. It’s probably a virus waiting to happen.

DO THIS NOW: Use Internet Explorer to visit Microsoft Windows Update and apply all critical patches. Even if you are a Firefox or Chrome user, you use Internet Explorer.

If you run a small business with 10 to 150 employees that is based in South Florida (Ft. Lauderdale, Boca Raton, West Palm Beach to Ft. Pierce)  and you are not sure whether or not you are getting these updates, or you are questioning if you have a Antivirus/Antispyware solution, give us a call or drop us a line.  We’re ready to assist you in keeping your business computer network safe and have many plans available.

More information: Microsoft Security Advisory Bulletin MS10-002.

[Update: 1/28/2010] Very good site with current zero-day vulnerabilities and how long they have been in the wild and not patched.

Computer Network Support and Managed Services Pro

I was delighted this morning to open up the online edition of ChannelPro Magazine and find that DedicatedIT was featured in the “Pricing Managed Services Like the Pros” article.

Not only is it nice to see your name in print, but it’s very flattering to be called a “Managed Services Pro” by a well-respected magazine like ChannelPro.

I guess that taking a leap of faith and deciding to perform only Managed Services (and not hourly, break-fix work) for our clientele is beginning to pay off. It has allowed us to focus and become  “pros” at what we do.

Was DedicatedIT the only Computer Network Support Company that Had Difficulty Pricing Services?

No. The article says that DedicatedIT was not alone in not really knowing how to price our services. What we were doing was so new, there really weren’t any playbooks or other companies from which to to copy.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

Most newcomers to managed services struggle with price-setting. Adam Steinhoff found it easy. “It was probably a little too easy,” chuckles Steinhoff who is president and CEO of DedicatedIT, a managed services provider in West Palm Beach, Fla. He just arbitrarily chose figures that sounded low enough to attract customers but high enough to earn a profit.

Read the full article on pricing computer network support for managed services providers.

I am told by our clients that our response times, our ‘fix it the first time’ mentality and our staff”s warm personalities are what keep them doing business with us.

However, I know that our monitoring system has something to do with it, as well. You see, we have a monitoring system that watches our clients’ computer systems 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It alerts our team to services that need to be restarted, settings that need to be tuned, configurations that aren’t optimal and even software that is outdated. It’s this ability to be proactive and catch and correct small issues before they become big ones that gives a managed services provider like DedicatedIT the upper hand.

Every Managed Services Provider has a Computer Network Monitoring System now-a-days, Right?

Yep, but they don’t make the MASSIVE investment, of nearly $50,000, that DedicatedIT spent on our first one. Because the bar has been set low enough to allow nearly anyone with a credit card to become a managed services provider, how the data, that these monitoring systems create, is used is the most important distinguishing factor now.

South Florida Medical Office asks us to hit ‘Snooze’

Most of our clients sign up for one of our unlimited computer network service plans, but a few decide to keep their monthly costs low and go with a bare-essentials, preventative maintenance and monitoring only plan. The primary difference between the two is that, with the unlimited plans, we just fix stuff without asking you. With our lower-cost plan, we let you know that something needs to be fixed and you tell us if/when you want it fixed and then we bill you hourly. You can even decide to fix it yourself if you feel comfortable.

Recently, we received an email from one of our low-cost plan clients:

I am fully aware of the server status and all surrounding issues at this point. I will be in contact with your team, as I previously discussed with Adam, as soon as I have resolved the issues at hand. We can then discuss, Dedicated IT’s future role with the company.

No need to keep sending emails reminding us of the server status needing this type of assistance at this point

At first, I was taken aback from the email. Then, I quickly become very proud of our company. Our process worked!

1. An alert came in to notify us of something not quite right.
2. Our staff took ownership and reviewed the information.
3. Next, they emailed the client to let them know about the issue.
4. Included in the email were the options and our recommendation.
5. Each few days, we followed up with our client to make sure it was top of mind.
6. After weeks, the client got a stern “DANGER, DANGER” email.
7. Finally, obviously fed up with our tenacity, the client emailed us and asked us to stop.

My response to our client?

[Business owner] hired DedicatedIT to ensure that your network is safe. It could be considered negligent if we did not email you to let you know that backups and/or hard drives are failing. As always, it is up to you all how/whether you want the items fixed, but we need to continue to alert you.

I hope that you understand.

Will your South Florida Managed Services Provider Stand up to YOU when it’s the RIGHT thing to do?

Just because a company is able to purchase a monitoring and billing system that let’s them become a managed services provider doesn’t mean that they have the processes, management structure and confidence in place to actually BE a managed services provider.

Make sure that your company is in good hands. It takes more than software and a credit card to be a high-quality, long-lasting business partner who won’t let you shoot yourself in the foot.

Read more about our Managed Services and Computer Network Services plans for your South Florida business with 10 to 150 employees.

On December 22, 2009, a United States court of appeals ruled that Microsoft must stop selling versions of Microsoft Word (including Microsoft Office suites) that contain certain functionality that was ruled to infringe on a United States patent.

Brief History:

When Microsoft released the Office 2007 product line, they updated the code base to utilize XML as a more efficient and open standard (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx, etc).  However, at the same time, they also embedded certain “Custom XML Markups” that seem to have previously been patented by another person or company.  Therefore, they have to remove the patented code.

What this means:

Any and all licenses for Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Word 2007 that are purchased after January 11, 2010 must use updated media or must be patched.

Reparations:

Thankfully, Microsoft has made this easy for us all by providing a simple update that will be located at the Microsoft Download Center and will be available before January 11, 2010.  We can use this to update current media we possess or will possess (media ordered tomorrow has probably been sitting on shelves in a warehouse for months if not longer).  The other alternative will be to download a new image of the programs (ISOs) from your MSDN, Volume Licensing, or Open License sites.

If you need assistance or have further questions, please comment below.

“I LOVE the speed of the system and the new monitor is AWESOME” – Sue Ellen

Lake Worth Law Office Computer Network Upgrade

This past week, one of our clients got their desktop computers upgraded to Windows 7 without charge. This didn’t happen as part of a holiday promotion, or because we were feeling extra generous.

The upgraded performed by DedicatedIT included:

• Upgrading the desktop computers from Windows XP to Windows 7.
• Migrating all personal settings like wallpaper and printers.
• Reinstalling all of their applications (WordPerfect, Time tracking, etc.)
• Training their staff how to get around Windows 7.

What did this South Florida law firm (Lake Worth, specifically) do so right to have a major upgrade like this completed for no charge?

• Step #1: Started doing business with DedicatedIT in 2001.
• Step #2: Signed a  DedicatedIT Complete contract for their Lake Worth computer network support.
• Step #3: Purchased Microsoft Software Assurance as recommended by DedicatedIT.
• Step #4: Let us do our thing.

Result of the Computer Network Upgrade?

The upgrade was delivered on time and with minimal pain to the staff. More importantly, they didn’t spend a dime.

[update 1/4/2010]: Spoke with our client today. The paralegals are happy with the upgrade, but did complain a little about the way that some functions in Word Perfect when used on Windows 7. They did admit that it was likely just a “change” thing and they will get used to it.

Refreshingly simple computer network support for your South Florida business (or law firm) with 10 to 150 employees.