Anchor Holiday Hours of Operation

Good afternoon-
The holidays are a time when we all look to enjoy some down time to spend with family and friends. At Anchor we use this time to rest and reinvigorate ourselves for the New Year ahead. To accomplish this we will be operating on limited hours the week between Christmas and New Years. As always we will be handling server down emergencies during this time in accordance to your support agreement. For clients with desktop support agreements we will also be handling urgent needs such as a pc that won’t boot, no ability to send/receive email, no ability to print anywhere, etc. All other service requests will be prioritized and handled on Monday, Jan 4th.

Holiday Hours of Operation:
December 24th 8:00am -12:00pm
December 25th CLOSED
December 28-31st Limited hours of operation
January 1st CLOSED

I want to sincerely thank you for your business in 2009 and wish you a very prosperous New Year. We look forward to serving you in 2010 and hope you get to enjoy some much deserved time off during the holidays.

Merry Christmas from everyone at Anchor!

Best Regards,
Vince

FYI: Blackberry Experiencing Outage

Good Morning-

Just a quick heads up that Blackberry is having a nationwide outage for all Blackberry Internet Service accounts. This affects all carriers and all BIS users. Our staff called Verizon to verify and they did not have an estimated time of resolution just yet.

Please note: If you have Blackberry Enterprise Server for your users this should not be affecting them.

Merry Christmas,
Vince

Microsoft ActiveX Video Control Flaws

As many of you are aware, Microsoft announced earlier this week there were two flaws in the video ActiveX controls in Internet Explorer. They have been working around the clock to develop a patch for it and anticipate having one available 7/15, but there is nothing definite at this time. As a result, Anchor has worked in conjunction with our NOC team and monitoring tool vendor to develop a script that we can run to work around the vulnerability. When the patch is released, we can then rerun the script disabling the changes and apply the patch.

Like anything else, the script has been tested but isn't 100% guaranteed to work, however we'd like to be proactive here rather than reactive-even if it is just a short wait for the patch to be released. For clients who have desktops under contract with us, we will take care of this automatically for you via the agent that is installed on each pc. You shouldn't experience any issues in Internet Explorer but if you do please give us a call.

For all other clients, you can either wait for the patch next week, or visit this link to run the fix, and then run the other tool to remove it once the patch is released. The link is: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/972890

Please note we will only be running this on workstations, as it affects Internet Explorer and we do no web browsing from the server.

In all honesty I'm not overly concerned with this vulnerability and think we'd probably be fine waiting until a Microsoft approved patch is released next week-in fact we debated this as a team. Since we have the ability to do something about it now, we decided as a team to take action rather than risk the chance of being burned.

Have a great weekend,
Vince

Windows 7 Release Date and Office 2010

Good morning. I just wanted to bring you up to speed on a few Microsoft items. In previous blog posts, I speculated that even though Microsoft was saying 1st quarter 2010 for Windows 7, I thought they'd have it out by year's end. I also said that when released, it was my bet Microsoft would no longer sell Windows XP. It appears I am 1 for 2!

Microsoft has announced that Windows 7 will be released 10/22/09, but they will continue offering the downgrade license to Windows XP until 2011. This is mostly due to large corporate environments not being ready to deploy Windows 7 just yet. While I don't have confirmation, I believe Dell will continue to give us the option to buy a computer preloaded with XP, however once Windows 7 is released Anchor will no longer be advising clients do so. In our testing, Windows 7 has been terrific. There are no real bells and whistles here, just better security under the hood and better peformance and reliability than Vista!

Should you need to purchase new computers this fall, we'll recommend Windows 7 but of course give you the option of selecting XP as long as it is available. Before selecting Windows 7 as your operating system, it will be imperative you check to ensure all applications you are using are compatible. For example, if you are using anything older than Quickbooks 2007, you would need to upgrade that as well, so XP might still be your choice in this scenario.

On another note, are you ready for Office 2010? Candidly, I'm not.....and I don't think many of our clients are. We're all still adjusting to Office 2007, and we have many clients on Office 2003 still. I just wanted you to be aware we will see it about this time next year. For clients who have Office licensing with Software Assurance from Microsoft, you will get this upgrade for free. For those of you who do not, there is the potential of having 3 different flavors of Office on your network, so you may want to consider standardizing next year.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments!

Anchor Customer Survey Reminder

Good morning and Happy Friday! Thanks to all who took a few minutes to complete our client satisfaction survey. We really appreciate your time and effort on this to help us improve our service delivery.

For those who haven't done so, here's just a reminder and the link to our customer satisfaction survey. We'd appreciate it if you could complete and/or pass on to other folks in your office as applicable. The more data we can gather, the better information we'll have to help us improve!

Here is the link:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=B0Gz8sw8c_2f3qIs5lZlkv2Q_3d_3d

Have a great weekend, and thanks again for your business!

Regards,
Vince

A Little Help From Our Customers

As a consumer, I’m typically not a huge fan of customer satisfaction surveys. It seems they are always being sent by huge companies who never show me real change anyway, so what’s the point?

Today I am going to be a complete hypocrite and ask you to take 5 minutes and complete our short survey to let us know how we are doing. At Anchor, we want to ensure we are providing the best service possible to you. As a small business, your input is the only way we can measure ourselves and improve our service delivery. The survey is completely anonymous, and the results will be compiled and sent directly to me. We will then review the results as a team and take action to improve as a company.

You can find the survey at the link below:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=B0Gz8sw8c_2f3qIs5lZlkv2Q_3d_3d

I realize your time is valuable, and really appreciate you taking a few minutes to help us make Anchor better. Please feel free to forward this link to any of your users as well. The more input the better!

Thanks for your time and consideration,
Vince

April 1st Virus Information!

As you may have heard, the latest virus threat, DOWNAD worm (a.k.a. Conficker), is believed to take effect on April 1st. Anchor has received numerous questions regarding this threat and what can be done to help prevent issues. If your server and/or workstations are under contract with us, they have been patched with the Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-067 created to resolve the vulnerability the virus exploits. In addition most all antivirus programs are set to update dail and in some cases hourly with the latest virus definitions. Lastly your SonicWALL or Anchor Managed Security appliance has a gateway antivirus service which provides us another layer of security to help ward off this threat.

Please be aware that these are layers of protection but do not guarantee we won't have any infections, which can often be initiated by user actions regardless of antivirus. We are cautioning all users to be aware of any email attachments being opened within the next few days. If you are not 100% sure of the sender AND attachment, do not open it!

For more information on this virus, please see Trend Micro's article here: http://blog.trendmicro.com/what-will-go-downad-on-april-1/

Please contact the helpdesk if you have any questions or concerns!

Phone System Issues Resolved

Good afternoon-

I was informed a few hours ago by Level 3 Communications that our phone system is now functioning properly again and all tests indicate that this is the case, so please feel free to give us a call as needed on our office number of 303-904-0494.

Thanks so much for your patience and your business!

Phone Service Issues at Anchor Today-3/12/09

Good Morning-

This morning our phone provider is experiencing service issues and our inbound phone lines are not operating properly. If you try to call our office, you may experience a fast busy signal or it may disconnect you after dialing an extension. Our provider is working on this issue and should have it resolved shortly for us. We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience and will notify you once the issue has been resolved. In the meantime, please send any service requests directly to helpdesk@anchornetworksolutions.com and we will be in touch as soon as possible. Our helpdesk team is in the office today working diligently on requests as they come in!

Thanks, Vince

Important Windows 7 News

I have shared with many of you that we at Anchor continue to recommend Windows XP for new computer purchases, and skipping Windows Vista in favor of Windows 7 when it arrives. It's been my feeling that Windows 7 would essentially be the fixed up and optimized Vista.....meaning what Vista should have been the first time! Why else would Microsoft be working so diligently on Vista's successor just a year later? Well, early reports are confirming those thoughts which is good news for all of us.

Follow the link below to an article in today's Wall Street Journal:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123258632983004629.html

Microsoft typically gets enough bad press as it is, and never have I seen anything so positive in a critique of a beta release. So we'll get a little geeky at Anchor and install it for ourselves to take an early peek at what it can do and be sure to report back to you. Let us know if you have any questions!