Now where did that email go?

If you are like me, Outlook pretty much manages your whole life. It tracks daily activities, important appointments, phone numbers, addresses and perhaps most importantly, critical information that has been received or sent through email. How in the world is a person supposed to find important email?

Email is the defacto method for communicating. It's a written history or journal of important information. However, there is a limit to how much can be kept in Outlook and Exchange. Too much data on an exchange server can even shut it down. Policies make it difficult when you need something outside the age limit. You may not always be good at keeping your mailbox lean with only important content and removing the unneeded. Creating subfolders helps in organizating information but it doesn't reduce mailbox size. Archiving to a seperate pst is helpful but it can only grow so large also AND what if your system crashes? Local archive files are not usually backed up since the data isn't on the server so that's your responsibility.

What about managers and business owners (remember, they own your email) who want to monitor confidential information, review employee/client communications or what if an owner gets sued and discover that the unhappy employee deleted all relevant email so proof can't be produced! Never mind the time, effort and cost required because the court ordered you to produce all relavant messages within 90 days!

Well, there is a solution. If you want to be able track selected or all messages that come and go from your business for convenience, monitoring, compliance or legal purposes, you can. Exchange has a feature called Journalling. This feature allows the capture of every message sent or received from your Exchange server and sends it to a designated email address. To get a better understanding, read this article.

Journalling your exchange messages guarantees you have a copy of everything. No worries if you or an employee deletes a critical message. However, you may still have the laborious task of finding the message. To solve that task, there are several third party message archiving solutions out there.

Proabably the most affordable and easiest to implement is an appliance solution from Arcmail Technology called the Defender. The Defender accepts your journalled email from Exchange, indexes it and provides a web interface so you can quickly retrieve messages based on content, date, recipient and sender. You can view a demo of how the Defender works by clicking this link.

The Defender is about as simple as it gets for archiving and managing messages. After installing the defender, Exhange message retention policies can be set to keep your Exchange Server running lean and mean without creating stress for removing messages. No more complaints about your mailbox being too large and no stress over managing archive files!

Call or email for more info on the Defender. Mention you read this blog post and receive 10% off the cost of a Defender purchased through bitMASTERS Corporation.

Can you work from anywhere?

Never before has the ability for small businesses to work remotely been more important. Between flu epidemics, the qwest to cut costs in a difficult economic situation and even natural disasters have made it more important than ever to be able to work remotely.

Many businesses are developing contingency plans and continuity of operations plans to keep their businesses and operations going if and when critical employees are out. It's always a struggle to enable continued productivity without a full workforce or if a key employee is unable to be physically at the office.

Is your business prepared? If you aren't familiar with or utilitizing technologies such as remote access or smart phones to stay connected whether you are sick, travelling or prevented from reaching the office due to other issues then let us help you get prepared.

Small Business Server is a platform which offers Remote Web Workplace, Exchange Server and Sharepoint. We are small business experts and we know how to get you connected remotely. Through Remote Web Workplace you can connect to any workstation on your network. With Exchange Server you have Outlook Web Access from a remote computer or your smart phone. Sharepoint allows you to share documents via the web. If you aren't using Small Business Server then there are other ways we can connect you. Don't wait until you have to be remotely connected, it may be sooner than you think!

Are you prepared?

Safer Internet Solution You Shouldn't Be Without

bitMASTERS Corporation has partnered with OpenDNS to provide our valued clients with a free added service to secure your network's internet security through content filtering and anti-phishing. OpenDNS is the leading provider of free security and infrastructure services that make the Internet safer. Part of this is by providing user control over web content (what can be surfed) for your home or business network. Other solutions for web content control have been cumbersome or costly to implement. OpenDNS works by simply configuring DNS entries to the OpenDNS servers. DNS is what directs web requests by name to the actual address of the request. i.e. www.bitmasters.com to 98.124.199.1 We at bitMASTERS can make this change for you and manage your security levels. After initial configuration of DNS, by default, phishing sites (those that try to trick you in to providing sensitive information) are automatically blocked. You can then request any or all of over 50 categories of sites to be blocked such as pornography, gambling, chat, games, radio, and webmail to name a few (we'll go over the full list when configuring). You can also specify individual sites to be blocked or unblocked even if they fall within a category that is blocked. An easy to understand page is displayed when a blocked site is attempted with a link to request the site be unblocked in case it is blocked in error. This service really is a no brainer for every home and business network. Call us to get protected today. Set up is very fast and easy. There are no monthly fees however labor fees for setup and maintenance would apply. You can be sure you are protected by OpenDNS by looking at the icon in the left column of this page under OpenDNS Check. If if says "You're using OpenDNS!" then you are covered otherwise we need to get you protected. You can learn more about OpenDNS by clicking on the same icon at left.

Need Electronics?

One of our major suppliers has acquired one of the largest US electronic distributors. What this means is we now have access to all major brands of electronic anything from small appliances to televisions including 2-way radios, scanners, cameras and camcorders, car audio, cellular, GPS, headphones, home audio and video, security and video games to name a few. No, we are not expanding our business in to an electronic superstore but we may be able to save you some money if you are in the market for anything electronic. Just let us know what you are looking for and we'll see if we can save you some money!