Anchor Network Solutions IT Update

Telephone services for Anchor

2010-09-20T13:54:00.002-06:00

Hello,
We just wanted to let our clients know that we were having telephone connectivity problems earlier on today. We were not able to take calls from our clients during that time. However, the issue has been resolved and we will now be able to accept calls from our clients. In the future, if you experience abnormally long hold times, please email us at helpdesk@anchornetworksolutions.com

New email virus

2010-09-09T14:29:00.002-06:00

It has come to our attention here at Anchor Network Solutions that a new email virus released today is targeting people at random through a very devious email message. We wanted to let our clients know as soon as we could about this threat. Identifying this email virus is as simple as looking at the subject line of your email.

"Here you have" may appear in the subject line. The body of the message will contain a note saying something familiar to "Hello: This is the document I told you about, you can find it here...."

Do not open the email message no matter who it is from, simply delete it.

If infected, this virus will rapidly start sending out emails to all of your contacts and make it appear as if you had sent them. The best way to avoid getting this virus is to delete any email that fits the description above. To permanently delete the email, just highlight it in your inbox, press and hold shift, and then press D.

Anchor Monitoring System Back Online

2010-08-11T15:17:00.002-06:00

Good Afternoon:

Our vendor has informed us their data center is now back online, and therefore our monitoring tool is able to report any alerts in properly to the system. The system came back online around 1:30pm MDT and is fully operational.

This is the first time in 2 years with our provider that this has happened, and we appreciate your patience while we were briefly flying blind!

Thank you for you business and friendship. Have a great afternoon.

Regards,
Vince

Anchor Monitoring Software Offline

2010-08-11T12:11:00.003-06:00

Good afternoon-

For clients where we monitor servers and pcs, our monitoring software datacenter is currently offline. This means the software that is running each machine in your office is functioning properly, however the datacenter it reports into is offline. Our vendor is working very dilligently to bring services back online as soon as possible, but they do not have an ETA for us. As a result, we are manually going through all of our client sites to verify up time on your servers-the most critical systems in your network. This also means we may not instantly know if there is an issue like we normally do. We will let you know as soon as service is restored.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

A New Addition to Anchor!

2010-05-27T14:07:00.011-06:00

Anchor Network Solutions, Inc. Announces:

A New Addition to our Staff

Fatou Diallo

Fatou was recently hired as our newest team member and will be working primarily as a Tier 1 and 2 technician helping with both onsite service calls as well as remote support for Anchor. Before joining our team, Fatou worked as a PC/Deployment Tech for Bell Soft at Cigna and an IT consultant for ICC, a small business in Fort Collins. She brings several years of experience with PC hardware and software in a helpdesk environment to Anchor. Fatou came to the United Stated from Guinea, West Africa in 1994 seeking better education opportunities and fell in love with Colorado. She started her Bachelor's at Colorado State University in 1997 and graduated with a BS in Business Administration with a concentration in Computer Information Systems. Since then, Fatou has passed her A+ certification and will be working toward becoming Microsoft certified in the near future.

We are excited to have her on board and have high expectations! Please help us in welcoming her to our team!

New Windows Phone & Anchor on Social Media

2010-02-17T12:28:00.003-07:00

Two years after Apple introduced the iPhone, Microsoft has announced it's own similar product: Windows Phone 7 Series. That's a mouthful! You can learn more about it here: http://tinyurl.com/yeslecb . It will have some integration with Xbox and Zune in addition to many other features. Currently Microsoft's phone OS powers 13.1% of all smart phones in the U.S., third behind iPhone and Blackberry. With Google's Android gaining market share, the timing is critical. For those of you who like the current straightforward email, calendar, and contacts function of a Windows Mobile device, expect the new ones to look more like Droids and iPhones and less like Blackberry devices. We'll let you know more as these devices become available.

Lastly, Anchor has joined in the social media fray. You can find us on Twitter and Facebook. We hope you'll join us online!

Anchor Holiday Hours of Operation

2009-12-21T14:45:00.003-07:00

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

2009-12-17T08:53:00.003-07:00

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

2009-07-10T14:12:00.002-06:00

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

2009-06-22T10:59:00.002-06:00

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

2009-06-19T09:02:00.002-06:00

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

2009-06-02T09:11:00.002-06:00

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!

2009-03-31T14:54:00.002-06:00

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

2009-03-12T13:48:00.003-06:00

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

2009-03-12T09:40:00.002-06:00

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

2009-01-22T15:48:00.002-07:00

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!

Holiday Hours

2008-12-24T11:09:00.002-07:00

Good Morning-

Just an fyi that Anchor's holiday hours are as follows:

December 24th-Closed at 12pm MDT
December 25-26-Closed

December 31st-Closed at 12pm MDT
Jan 1-2-Closed

As always, clients with service agreements have 24x7x365 coverage for server emergencies.

Please let us know if you have any questions!

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year,
Vince

Holiday Business Hours

2008-11-25T14:18:00.002-07:00

Good Afternoon!

Our offices will be closed in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday this Thursday and Friday. We will resume normal business operations on Monday, December 1st.

For clients with service agreements, rest assured that while our business offices are closed, our NOC team will continue to monitor and resolve any issues on your server during this time. As always, we also have our on call technician available for any after hours server emergencies as well.

At Anchor we have much to be thankful for. We thank you for your business and appreciate the opportunity to serve you. Have a great Thanksgiving, and we hope you get to enjoy some down time before the rush of the holiday season!

Urgent Microsoft Patch for all Monitored Clients!

2008-10-23T15:02:00.002-06:00

Today Microsoft released security bulletin MS08-067 as an unscheduled patch release. This bulletin affects all current supported versions of Microsoft Windows (Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, & 2008) and identifies a vulnerability where an attacker could execute code of their choice on a vulnerable machine without authentication. Direct external attacks are unlikely due to the public facing firewall you have in place, however if a machine were to become infected from a user download or malicious website, the infected PC on the LAN would be able to infect other vulnerable Windows machines on the LAN as well. Therefore we are working with our NOC team to deploy this patch on all monitored servers and workstations this evening starting at 7pm.

This is very short notice from Microsoft and uncharacteristic for them to release a patch off schedule. As a result, we are heeding their warnings and have a sense of urgency to get the patch applied to all monitored servers and workstations this evening. If you have our patch deployment service for pcs, please ask your users to keep their pc turned on this evening so the patch can be applied. It will also require a reboot, so your users may find their pc at the logon screen tomorrow. Thanks for your time and please contact our Help Desk if you have any problems.

Surprise, Surprise......XP Deadline Extended Again!

2008-10-10T17:04:00.003-06:00

Happy Friday to all!

Today we received breaking news from Microsoft which I'm sure will come as a shock to all of you (sense my sarcasm?).....but the sale of Windows XP has been extended from Jan 31, 2009 to July 31, 2009. This means that for the 3rd time since Windows Vista was released, Microsoft has extended the date to which customers can buy computers with Windows XP preinstalled. New computers will continue to ship with the Windows Vista license should you choose to upgrade at a later time.

In my opinion Windows Vista is an ok operating system now that it has had a service pack released for it, however my take is that it is too late for this version of Windows. It has received so much negative press that it will never recover. Do I like it better than XP? Absolutely not (I did say "ok" operating system!). We'll still recommend XP to clients, however we have no problem working with Vista either. Microsoft has been quietly working on what they are calling Windows 7, which is the successor to Vista and is slated for release sometime in 09. We went roughly 6 years without a new operating system, and now they are going to release another one in under 2 years....just a coincidence? I don't think so!

New Archive Link for ExchangeDefender Clients

2008-09-04T09:47:00.002-06:00

For all of our clients using ExchangeDefender as a spam and business continuity solution for email operations, there have been some recent improvements to the product.

In the past, ED's LiveArchive service created an exact replica of your email server for the past 7 days. So if your company's email server were to go down, you could still send and receive email from this web based account while the server was being repaired. The new LiveArchive service is powered by Microsoft Exchange 2007, and looks more like Outlook Web Access. You can even import your contacts into this mailbox so you have what you need in case of emergency. Best of all, rather than providing archiving for the past 7 days, it now includes email archiving for the past year!

To check it out, go to https://livearchive.exchangedefender.com/owa and sign in with your ED username and password that you received at activation time. Best of all, these added features come with no price increase!

Anchor to Implement Trip Charge Fee

2008-06-20T12:40:00.003-06:00

Due to rising fuel prices, Anchor will be instituting a trip charge of $35 starting 7/1/2008 for any onsite service calls in the Denver Metro area. While many of our competitors have done this for years, Anchor has never had a trip charge or billed for travel time to clients in the Denver Metro area. Rather than increase minimum onsite fees, increase rates, or bill for travel time, we've chosen an onsite trip fee which we believe is the most equitable solution.

The good news is that this will rarely impact our clients as we do almost all of our support work remotely. For issues that cannot be resolved through remote remediation, only then is an onsite visit scheduled. As always, we will do everything we can to resolve any client issues remotely as it offers the fastest resolution time and is less expensive since we bill in smaller time increments.

Thank you for your understanding. We appreciate your business and value you as a client. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Vince at 303-904-0494 or by email: vince@anchorns.com.

How to Open an Office 2007 File in Older Office Versions

2008-06-03T07:51:00.002-06:00

We frequently hear from folks who are using older versions of Microsoft Office that they cannot open files in the new Office 2007 file format. There are a few ways to deal with this issue.

If you have Office 2007 and others can't read your docs, set Word/Excel to save all files by default in the old format. In Word you'd select the round button in upper left hand corner, choose "Word Options," and "Save" item. You can then select the old format of .doc for your default file type. Follow the same procedure for Excel.

If you have an older version of Microsoft Office and sometimes receive files in the new 2007 format, follow the link at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA101686761033.aspx to download and install the Office Compatibility Pack. This will allow you to open new Office 2007 files in an older version of Office.

Hope this a useful tip!

Undeliverable Emails & Why You Get Them

2008-04-18T12:47:00.003-06:00

We've received many inquiries lately as to why you might receive an undeliverable email for something you've never sent. The email might look like the one below:

From: System Administrator
Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2008 10:07 AM
To: Vince Tinnirello
Subject: Undeliverable: Replica watches

Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.
Subject: Replica watches
Sent: 4/17/2008 8:17 AM
The following recipient(s) could not be reached:
h@mmi.com.sg on 4/17/2008 10:04 AM
The e-mail account does not exist at the organization this message was sent to. Check the e-mail address, or contact the recipient directly to find out the correct address.
<>

What's most often happening is this: Either a spammer or a virus has gotten it's a hold of your email address, and is forging it into the 'From' section of the email they are sending. In the 'To' section, it is putting other email addresses it knows. Not all of the 'To' addresses are valid, since people do occasionally change email addresses. Thus, these invalid ones get returned to you, even though you didn't send the email in the first place. How do spammers get your email address? Most often not from you, but from someone you've sent email to. It could be that someone you've sent email to has a virus, or in other cases it may come from your website if you have email addresses listed there. Many spammers use tools that gather emails off of websites in the "contact us" section to use. So if you have "info@" or "sales@" forwarding to your mailbox, this is the probably the culprit.

What can we do about it? Unfortunately there is nothing that can be done to stop this from happening. Using an email security tool like ExchangeDefender will reduce the number of these you see, but it can't prevent it 100%. I'd also recommend not putting individual emails such as "vince@" on your website to further reduce the risk. For the rest that come through, your best bet is just to delete them and move on with your day. I hope this was helpful and please let us know if you have any questions!

Welcome to Anchor's New Blog!

2008-02-18T15:35:00.002-07:00

Welcome to the new Anchor Network Solutions "IT Update" blog. We will use this tool as a means to communicate pertinent information relating to IT and doing business with Anchor. All postings should come to you via email, and you should only hear from us once or twice per month. If at any time you no longer wish to receive the occasional posting from us, please just let us know!