Micro-Business Maintenance Ltd Blog

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“Micro-Business Maintenance Ltd have been working to provide Strand Europe with mail systems, Internet access and server support since 1997.  The number of issues I have had on their E-mail system makes Microsoft Exchange look like a poor second. They are an excellent team providing clear and relevant communications, tenacity in problem resolution and a level of technical advice both in breadth and depth which I have not seen equalled in organisations 10 times their size.  I am sorry they are not nearer geographically to us.  I heartily recommend them as consultants and providers of relevant solutions to meet business needs.”

Jason - A big, big thank you for pulling out the stops and helping to transfer a website to a new server at incredibly short notice. The transfer process has been extremely smooth and your technical guidance very useful. You've helped me keep a valued client happy. Thanks again!

From experience it takes 3 - 5 days to buy, setup and restore a customer's fileserver, network and data after it has been stolen, burnt or had water damage. We know how frustrated customer's get if their email is down for one hour! We want to stop this happening so please ask yourself this:  Could your business cope without your network, fileserver and data for a week?

Would your business suffer? How much business would you lose? Would your business survive? What would your customers think if you couldn't process their orders?  Many businesses never recover from a disaster of this sort.

Think about the amount of time it would take you to restore your systems if your key infrastructure failed or became unavailable. Most customers agree that being 'down' for 3-5 days is not good enough.

We can get you back up and running in a few hours!

New techniques allow us to take an image of your server and continuously stream updates off-site to our local data centre. At the same time, we are continuously restoring your server as a virtual machine in the data centre. This means that if you suffer a serious failure, we can take your latest server image, marry it up with a loan server and bring it to your site within hours... not days!

This kind of continuous off-site server imaging has only recently been cost effective for small businesses. We are offering you this service from a local data centre so that was can react quickly and get you up and running in a few hours.

We believe our new server disaster recovery offering is a 'no brainer' for SMEs who understand the importance of IT to their business.

Remember, your server could crash tonight so give us a call on 01902 324494 if you want to talk about disaster recovery in your company. Or visit our IT continuity and disaster recovery page on our web site.

IT COMPANY SETS ITS SIGHTS ON CARBON REDUCTION

A West Midlands IT company is helping their customers with carbon reduction by transferring all their hosting to a carbon neutral data centre. This will help customers meet their carbon reduction targets.

Nigel Mills, managing director of MBM based in Wombourne, explained: “Many companies struggle to meet carbon reduction targets that form part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) commitment. We’re getting asked more and more about the carbon footprint of IT systems, so when we were looking for a new provider we included this as one of our criteria.”

MBM’s new data centre in Manchester is completely carbon neutral. In 2008 the supplier planted 150 acres of forestry on its farm in Scotland. These trees now carbon neutralise all CO2 emissions emitted from the data centre. In addition, the facilities are energy efficient achieving a power usage efficiency (PUE) rate as low as 1.32 against an average of 2.2.

Jason Timmins, technical director at MBM, said: “We host many customers' servers in our internet data centre and, even with advances in power management, these machines consume a lot of electricity. A medium-sized web server that's busy running your e-commerce web site could easily consume 500W of power all day, every day. Clearly, reducing the environmental impact of that is important. Our customers understand that servers consume plenty of electricity and, under pressure from demanding carbon reduction targets, they asked us to examine the power that is consumed on their behalf.”

He added: “We believe we have sourced an affordable hosting solution for businesses that neutralises its carbon footprint and provides all the technology, security and industry leading service level agreements that is fit for today’s business environment.”

-ENDS-

What is Cloud Computing?

  Cloud computing is a way of outsourcing all or part of your IT system to suppliers on the Internet. Cloud services are usually paid for on a monthly OPEX basis rather than large one-off CAPEX costs to implement similar in-house solutions.

  For instance, Email is a classic example of a cloud service. You can, if you choose, buy an expensive server, install Microsoft Exchange and run your Email in-house. However, you could let Microsoft or Google run your Email mailboxes for you in their data centres and simply pay each month for each user that you have. You are thereby removing the capital expenditure of a new mail server but replacing it with an operational expenditure fee each month that is closely matched to what you actually use, rather like a pay-as-you-go mobile phone.

  Increasingly, you can place more than just your Email services into the cloud. You can, for instance, buy cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) systems or online accounts systems or online versions of your favourite Office software. Everything is stored in the cloud so there’s no on-site hardware, software, maintenance or support.

  It can be a very cost effective approach for certain organisations…

  ·         Very Small – If there are only a few of you in your business then cloud services can work very well. It means that you don’t have to buy a server to hold all your data centrally.

·         Medium-sized and larger – The costs of deploying important services such as Email, CRM, collaboration and line-of-business applications in larger organisations can be very expensive. It is seen as a better option to let a cloud services supplier deal with all the technicalities of purchasing, implementing, managing and supporting these solutions and for the company to simply purchase what it needs on a monthly basis. No big CAPEX spend, no extra in-house IT support and in-house technicians and a simple monthly fee.

·         Highly Distributed/Mobile Businesses – If your staff work at different locations or travel extensively and your organisation has no major head office, cloud services work very well because they can be accessed from anywhere using the Internet.

·         Start-up Businesses – Often new businesses choose not to spend their precious start-up capital on expensive in-house IT infrastructure and choose instead to buy cloud services, paying for them on a monthly basis and increasing them as their businesses grow.

  Each organisation needs to look carefully at both the cloud and in-house (also called ‘on-premise’) options to understand which is best for them. Some businesses, like banks and financial organisations, are bound by regulation to keep their customers’ data in their own data centres and so will never use public cloud services. Some businesses might just prefer to spend a large amount of money initially and not have to keep paying during the life of the service. These kinds of decisions are as much down to the financial director as they are to the IT director.

  What About Small Businesses?

  Whether cloud services are right for small businesses is a tricky question. A traditional, single-site small business can buy a Hewlett Packard server running Microsoft Small Business Server for relatively little money. This will give them everything they need to run their business for five years or more. However, a similar set of cloud services will cost them the same amount as the in-house server in two years. It doesn’t quite add-up. Unless you are one of the type of organisations mentioned above (very small, highly distributed or a start-up) you might as well buy a new server and look at the cloud services only when that server needs to be replaced.

  Naturally, we have been providing small business servers for 20 years and are well place to help with your server requirements.

  Different Types of Cloud Services

  For companies looking for cloud services, here are the broad offerings that we supply…

  ·         Public Cloud – We are a Microsoft Cloud Essentials partner and as such are certified to supply Microsoft’s wide range of cloud solutions.

·         Private Cloud – We run our own cloud in our Manchester data centre so can offer highly customised Windows cloud services for those organisations who don’t want to use a public cloud.

·         Software-as-a-Service – We can offer Microsoft range of SaaS packages including Office 365, Exchange Online, Dynamics CRM and Azure infrastructure services.

  Why Choose MBM for your Cloud Services?

  Most of our customers see the benefits of cloud services but are wary of sending their critical data to a faceless public cloud provider. They much prefer to work with people they know and trust so, more often than not, we build a small private cloud solution in our data centre and they continue to deal with us. Our prices are similar to the well-known public cloud providers and the customer receives the same friendly, knowledgeable service they are used to.

  How to Sign-up?

  If you like what you see and want to know more, just call us. We don’t have any sales people so you’ll speak to a technician, you can explain the problem and we’ll give you a price. Our prices are cost effective, realistic and appropriate for the task in-hand.

Email Spam Overview

  Email spam is a real problem for most businesses. You probably know all too well why spam is such a problem but here are common issues

  1.       Lost Productivity – If your staff have to deal with an Inbox full of junk Email each morning (and as a continuous stream throughout the day), that’s wasted time.

2.       Spam Content – Some of the content in spam Emails is inappropriate for the workplace. The last thing you need are staff members complaining to you (or their union representative) about inappropriate pictures appearing in their Inbox all the time.

3.       IT Infrastructure Costs – Each spam Email you receive consumes a piece of your IT infrastructure; a piece of disk space, processing time on your Email server and, of-course, capacity on your Internet connection.

  Any of these issues on their own should be enough for you to install a good anti spam service but combined it’s no contest; you must tackle the spam problem… issue 1 costs you money, issue 2 opens you to legal problems and issue 3 slows down your IT systems! Call us to talk through how we can resolve these problems with our Filtered Email services or read on to hear more about these issues. Call on 01902 324494 or Email [email protected]

  A Bit More Detail

  “Why do I get spam?” We get asked this all the time. You receive unsolicited commercial Emails (to give spam its full title) because you have a working Email address and senders think you might buy things from them. They got hold of your address in any number of ways; here are a few possibilities…

  1.       They guessed your address – Domain names are listed on the Internet so getting hold of the bit of your address after the ‘@’ is easy, guessing the bit before the ‘@’ is more difficult. The spammers often use a brute force approach; believe it or not, they send Emails to every name in the dictionary ‘@’ your domain so that if your addresses are like this, ‘[email protected]’ they’ll get your address straight away. You can’t easily change your Email addresses so there’s relatively little you can do about this. For new addresses, you might consider including the surname, for instance ‘[email protected]’ would be almost impossible to guess.

2.       Your address is on your web site – Spammers use programs that ‘crawl’ the web looking for Email addresses. If yours is on your web site then they will find it eventually. Again, there’s relatively little you can do about this because you want people who look at your site to be able to Email you.

3.       Someone gave the spammer your address – You give out your Email address all the time, this can be when you register on a web site, sign-up for a newsletter or even when you hand out your business card. It’s what people do with your address that’s important to you. Some web site owners sell your address on to spammers. It’s understandable, if you run (say) a popular scuba diving web site with 50,000 members, perhaps you run it for free or maybe make a little bit of money from on-site advertising and then a spammer offers you a load of money for your Email address list, you might be tempted to sell him the list. Other people aren’t as careful with your address as you are. Your Email address is a valuable commodity so be careful where you use it, especially your business Email address.

  “How do I stop spam?” By subscribing to our service!  Once your address is on a spammer’s list you will never get off that list. You can’t Email them asking them politely to be removed, these people are criminals and don’t care about you at all. The best you can do is to choose a good spam blocking service (like ours) that will filter-out the vast majority of this junk Email before it gets anywhere near you, your staff or your IT systems.

  “Can you block ALL spam?” Simple answer… no… no-one can. It’s not possible to block all spam because it’s a very subjective process; one man’s spam is another man’s informative newsletter. Our service uses every possible method to identify spam and block it but no mechanism is perfect. We provide industry-leading levels of protection.

  “Don’t spams have viruses too?” Sometimes spam Emails include viruses too but we filter-out infected Emails as well.

  How our spam blocker works

  Firstly, we have built our Filtered Email service ourselves and we run it ourselves. It’s not a franchise; we’re not reselling someone else’s service… we run this service for our customers. It means that we control everything and can work closely with you. Spam filtering is a moving feast, techniques and practices are constantly evolving and we are able to adapt quickly to this changing landscape.

  Secondly, we block spam out on the Internet not on-site at your business. This means that we remove the spam from your Email flow prior to it reaching your network giving a number of benefits…

  1.       There’s no complicated software on your computers.

2.       No spam Emails clog-up your Email server or Internet connection.

3.       Our filters are on different continents on different networks and are extremely reliable. Your real Emails will always get through.

  This last item is critical, there’s no point having a spam filter if it’s unreliable or it delays your important Emails. Our services generally, and this service in particular, are built around reliability. Yes spam is a problem but not getting your Email at all is a REAL PROBLEM.

  Thirdly, we provide proper, real-world support. We are an IT services company; we have been looking after the IT support needs of businesses like yours for over 20 years. We understand what companies want from IT support so if you have a problem you call us and we’ll sort it out; no ticketing system, no overseas calls centre, no second or third line support, just skilled friendly people on the end of the phone who can fix your problem right away.

  How to sign up

  If you like what you see and want to know more, just call us. We don’t have any sales people so you’ll speak to a technician, you can explain the problem and we’ll give you a price. Our prices are cost effective, realistic and appropriate for the task in-hand. The pricing scheme is based on the number of Email users that you have; simply, that’s the number of individuals who will benefit from the service, not the number of domain names or the number of Email addresses… the number of people.

We have many small business customers who have just a single server (usually Microsoft Small Business Server) that runs their business. Naturally, these customers are very concerned about their only server. The loss of that machine could be very damaging for them so they take data backup very seriously. Traditional data backup is fine but, if they were to completely lose their server, it could take a couple of days to get them back on-line again. With the importance of Email to businesses and their absolute reliance of IT systems in general, this sort of delay is unacceptable; a better solution was required.

  One solution would be to use some kind of server mirroring technology or off-site replication technology but these techniques are too expensive for SMEs as they require lots of hardware and expensive software. What’s needed is a great backup solution that will replicate machine images off-site to our data centre and yet not cost the earth. Thankfully, such software exists and our tests show that it works beautifully!

  We’re now able to take complete server images (once every 15 minutes if required), copy them off-site over an existing ADSL connection and maintain a live virtual machine image that’s ready-to-go in the event of a serious failure. We reckon that if a customer was to lose a server overnight, we could be on-site with a working replacement server by 11am! That server could be a copy of their machine up to 15 minutes before the old server was lost.

  It’s really impressive technology that we’re about to implement across a three site, six server business in the Midlands. We’ll be using the technology to protect their file, Exchange, database and terminal servers.

  Once this solution is running and settled, we’ll be offering the solution to other SME customers. Drop us a line if you’re interested  in hearing more about it.

  Rest assured we’ll be blogging widely and at length about this technology as we believe it’s really important to our customers and SMEs in general.

We can offer free installation on three year Ethernet First Mile contracts signed before 30th June 2011. This could save you thousands as EFM services often have costly setup fees.

  Please call us today if you want to talk about EFM super-fast Internet connections. All we need is a post code in-order to give you an accurate quote.

  http://www.mbmltd.co.uk/Ethernet-in-the-First-Mile.aspx

I read an article this morning that spoke about how beneficial it is to your search engine optimisation to have domain names that contain the keywords you're focusing on. They call them Exact Match Domains. These are often difficult to get as popular keywords have already been registered, that said, we managed it with our domain UnlimitedDataBackup.com which immediately ranked very highly for that term. Apparently, if you can’t get the EMD you want, try adding a suffix to the end (like we did for our voip-uk.us domain below) as Google can work-out what you mean.

Domain names are quite cost effective to register so we registered the following…

  BusinessITSupport.us

EthernetFirstMile.us

OfficePhone.us

VoIP-UK.us

  Each of these domains redirects to an appropriate page on our main MBMLtd.co.uk web site.

  EMD names are certainly interesting option for SEO. We’ll have to see what happens.

Woohoo! We finally got our new Facebook fan page address. Check it out…

  http://facebook.com/mbmltd

Do you know how many old Emails you have in your Inbox? Do you need to keep all your emails for a long time? We often find that our customers' Email servers are slowly grinding to a halt because of the amount of Email people keep in their mailboxes. Clearly, we recognise the importance of retaining copies of your Emails, but there is a better way to approach this problem... Email archiving!

With Email archiving all your old Emails are removed from your mailbox and stored on a secure archive server. This device looks at your mailbox each day and, based on the rules you apply, moves your old Emails into the archive. If you want to recover an Email, you use the Outlook plug-in or the archive's web page to find the item you want. It's that simple!

In addition, the archive server stores all new Emails passing through your system. This means that you have a cast-iron copy of all your Email communications both internally and externally. We understand some organisations have to comply with 'Email compliance' procedures, but for most small businesses the issue is about knowing who said what to whom and when. The Email archive stores everything forever, even if the Email is deleted from the user's mailbox.

Email archiving used to be expensive, but new software used by MBM makes this functionality much more cost effective. The software runs on a standard, modern Windows PC and the total cost, including installation, is more affordable for small and medium sized organisations.

5 Mailboxes £899 25 Mailboxes £1,349 100 Mailboxes £2,799

Email archiving enables you to retain *all* your company's Email forever for just one single cost. Is it time to start Email archiving?

If you would like to find out more about Email Archiving, call 01902 324494 or Email

This is a nice corporate video from Microsoft about new user interfaces. It shows some new ways that people could interact with their computers. It looks like Microsoft are drawing on their experience with Kinect to offer some really interesting way of gaining access to computers in the home and the office.

I’ve run a business IT support company for more than twenty years and time-and-again my team visit company’s PCs that are crashing and randomly locking-up. More often than not, when we open the machine, we find that it’s full of dust. Dust will kill your computer.

  Certain components inside your computer run hot; modern CPUs working hard are too hot to touch. A processor that is running too hot will crash (Blue Screen of Death in Windows) or randomly reboot your machine. The dust and lint coats the cooling mechanisms and causes components to overheat. If you want to avoid these problems we recommend taking a look inside your computer every six months to make sure that there not too much dust inside. Here are some things to lookout for...

  1.       Check the air vents – Computers breath-in cool air from the front and expel hot air from the back. You need to make sure that these openings are not blocked either by dust or by external obstructions. I once visited a customer to examine their server and found the air intake to be covered in a mat of short brown hairs. I asked the business owner about the hair and whether they bought their dog to work, he said, “Oh, that’ll be the rats.” I took care of the blocked air vents , they took care of the rats and their server ran much more happily.

2.       Dust the insides – Completely disconnect the machine before you open it. Take the side off and have a look for dust, dead insects, etc and remove them from the machine. Try not to touch the delicate components inside; we find the best tool for cleaning the dust from inside a computer is a can of compressed air (these are often referred to as ‘air duster’ and can be found from any number of online retailers.) If the machine is particularly dusty (and the weather is fair) you may want to take the computer outside before you use the air duster; a surprising amount of dust will come out so it’s better to do the work outside. When using the air duster, pay particular attention to the heatsink (metal fins on top of the motherboard) and the fans that move air around the machine. When using a compressed air duster on the fans, hold the fan still so that it doesn’t turn in the jet of air. Some hard drives run hot so make sure they are also free of dust.

3.       Check your fans – Dust will work its way into the bearings of the fans that cool your computer. Make sure that the fans will turn freely, just move their blades with your finger, a fan should turn with very little effort. If the fan won’t turn or turns stiffly, it must be replaced. New fans are readily available online but you may wish to find a local expert to do the work for you.

  It’s our experience that if you do this every six months, you will have a nice, quiet, reliable computer. Many modern computers have protection from overheats so physical damage is often avoided but a regular maintenance routine will ensure that these problems don’t occur. Oh, and try not to have rats running around by your computer!

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunks allow existing VoIP-enabled business telephone systems to connect to the public telephone system over the Internet. A SIP trunk can handle many calls simultaneously using a single broadband Internet connection.

MBM's SIP trunks are commonly used to allow outbound calls to be made over the Internet which leaves existing telephone lines free for inbound calls. However, increasingly, customers are transferring (porting) their telephone numbers over to our SIP trunks so that they can also receive calls via the Internet as well as make calls. This means that expensive multi-channel ISDN lines can then be omitted altogether saving the organisation a considerable amount of money.

Our SIP trunks can support many different types of telephone numbers, region numbers, non-geographic numbers (0800, etc) and we can even offer international numbers from dozens of different countries.

Although SIP is the open standard for Internet phone calls, our service also supports the IAX proprietary standard used by Asterisk-based phone systems such as TrixBox.

Hosted telephony solutions allow businesses to replace their old telephone system with Internet handsets connected to a feature-rich phone system on the Internet. Calls are then made and received over the Internet using your ADSL broadband line. Many calls can be sent simultaneously over a broadband connection so considerable savings on line rentals can be made.

MBM's hosted telephony solutions come with a large number of features, many of which would be too expensive for small businesses to purchase directly themselves. Our solutions offer features such as voicemail-to-Email, direct dialling from your Outlook contacts, call recording, auto-attendant (voice menus) and intelligent call queuing.

One of the key features of a hosted telephony solution is that extensions can be located anywhere that is connected to the Internet. This is particularly useful for home workers, branch offices and international departments. All of these sites are effectively connected to one phone system so that calls between them are free and the management of the system is centralised.

In our view businesses should consider a hosted telephony solution for... • New Offices • Replacing Existing Phone Systems • Centralised Call Centres • Distributed Call Centres (with Agents Working at Home)

MBM's range of InterLinx Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) private branch exchange (PBX) servers deliver all the benefits of Internet telephony, but also the features of a traditional on-site telephone system. These machines are very popular with our business customers because they allow them to benefit from all the 'high-tech' features and cost savings of VoIP yet retain their existing, traditional telephone lines.

InterLinx Voice is based on the popular, open-source Asterisk PBX software. The features of this solution match any of those available from the traditional PBX manufacturers. Here are some of the important features of InterLinx Voice:-

• Local and Remote Extensions – Have handsets on-site or at your home or branch office • Call Recording – Automatic or on-demand call recording • Call Management – Transfers, diverts, conferencing, queues, menus, caller ID, paging, etc • Voicemail – Rich voicemail system and voicemails delivered to Email • Standards-based – Support for all kinds of handsets and devices • Hold Music – Play music or marketing messages while the caller is on hold • Existing Lines – ISDN2/30 or standard analogue lines • Web-based Admin – A full, easy to use, web-based management system • Outlook Integration – Dial contacts from Outlook • Many other features too numerous to mention!

MBM's InterLinx Voice solutions are supplied as a complete package including appropriate handsets, installation, training and support..

We're very pleased to have gotton our first article published on EzineArticles.com. It's an article about the servers we find with their RAID software not installed.