►From Jay's Desk
►How Big is Your Mailbox?
►Managing Your Network
►Vista: To Migrate or Not?
►Power of Thank You
►Email Connector
 

Welcome to the first issue of "RAM"blings. For those of you who said Heck would freeze over before this came out, I hope you have stock in coats and gloves down there.

With most of 2008 behind us and looking forward to 2009, I wanted to thank everyone for their support, friendship and business over the last 10 years.

For those that have met my daughter Jennifer, she is both a blessing and a new experience for my wife Suzi and myself. Both in watching her learn about this big world, and just seeing her endless attempts to get to where she wants to go. It is truly awe-inspiring to see how she keeps thinking outside the box to get things. In part, I am hoping that this newsletter will help us all look at things in a different way  -  to improve our businesses. Get out from behind that box we seem to put ourselves in and find ways to make our business better. With that I want to wish everyone a very Happy Thanksgiving!

We have spent a lot of time recently (which translates to a lot of extra expense for our customers) troubleshooting, managing, and working with VERY large mailboxes.

From a purely technical standpoint, once a mailbox gets over a GB in size, it starts to become a minor challenge in terms of supporting it, speed of access and search, and management in general. Once a mailbox gets to be over 2 GB in size, we start to run into some very serious limitations that will manifest in support, management, and disaster recovery scenarios.

Believe us when we say we are VERY heavy Outlook users, but using a few simple techniques, it is not much of a challenge at all to keep our own mailboxes under the 1 GB limit we need to keep us ‘light on our feet’ with our own mailboxes.

Ever heard a small-business owner say "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"? This simple old saying depicts the mentality of thousands of SMBs when it comes to preventing security breaches and assessing vulnerabilities within their networks.

If the servers are running, e-mails are accessible and customers aren't complaining about identity theft -- companies logically assume that their security measures, however informal, are working. This false sense of security is exactly what hackers and identity thieves prey on.

The truth of the matter is that networks of all sizes are vulnerable to attacks and security threats 24/7/365. Spyware, worms and viruses don't discriminate. If there is a way into your network, they will find it and you may, or may not, know about it. Although the short-term impact to your business is obvious, the long-term impact is what really keeps us up at night.

Security breaches and other malicious attacks not only take down the network and compromise your company's data and your customers' privacy, they can ruin your company's reputation. With competition around every corner, and new laws mandating the disclosure of data theft to affected consumers, news like this travels fast.

So what should you do?

After much ado, Microsoft's newest operating system release in almost five years, Vista became available to business users in November 2006. Vista offers no shortage of visually stunning effects and new features, but these benefits come at a price — namely the need for more powerful and faster PCs. If you are among the many that are considering adopting this new operating system for your small or mid-sized business, there are some important factors you need to consider before you make your decision.

Vista's key benefits
Microsoft developers have built Vista to succeed where previous versions have fallen short.

Here are just some of the improvements and features that are part of Vista:

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