Telephone services for Anchor

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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!