One big happy dysfunctional family called ATT is continuing to wreak havoc on users. It is not clear if they were hacked and won’t admit it or if the system imploded and they won’t admit that either.

What is clear to users is if you run a business and use an address like professionalemail@mybusiness.com and access the internet using ATT DSL you will have more trouble than you bargained for.  We assume you have already changed the SSL ports which is why you were able to progress to the 553 relay error.  All ATT DSL accounts have an address like myname1234@sbcglobal.net but go to sbcglobal.net to actually login using the button at the top of the page you will get an error 100% of the time. No need to switch browsers from Firefox to IE that is not the problem.

Here is the error:

You can go to my.att.yahoo.com using the same information and login successfully with webmail. I realize you are reading this because you need your Outlook to work and like many don’t want webmail.
This link will help some with basic outlook settings http://helpme.att.net/article.php?item=285

Searching you may find your self reading the following useless article.
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/original/manage/sendfrom-09.html

Here is a screen shot, and this info is wrong but keep reading.

In order to stop the error from happening you will have to login to the att.yahoo.com with your sbcglobal.net

account. Click on the Mail icon to go to your inbox. On the right will be an “Options” Link.

Next click on “Mail Address” in the center column.

Step 1. Click on “Add” the next prompt is to put in a friendly name. Click “Continue” which is almost hidden in the left corner under everything else but now you know where to find it.

Step 2, add the corporate email account. Click Continue.

Step 3. This the most important step. DON”T ENTER ANYTHING, click “Skip Shis Step”

Step 4. get ready to check your corporate email with Outlook. Click send verification and start checking your email address you entered in step 2. At the bottom of this email you will find the confirmation code. Copy and paste into the browser which is still on the confirmation screen. You will be prompted to enter the att password again and you are done.

Mail will now be allowed to go out under your corporate mail identity. Happy mailing!

The final end to the DVD player format contest is over. Toshiba and Sony both Japanese based companies have been clamoring for manufacturer support of their competing HD formats. Blu-ray holds more. Sony invested in Blu-ray integration with the popular Play Station 3. Toshiba struggled for support and announced they would no longer be producing products for the format . Consumers have just been confused by the whole affair anyway so this is a good thing. Blu-ray wins which is great for data users of the format but the video market is a different matter.

You would think life is going to be rosy but don’t be to sure. DVD in general is still in a battle for the video market. More and more free video on demand in HD is downloadable straight to your TV from the likes of Time Warner Cable, Verizon and others. Why bother with the DVD? So, we could be in for the eventual death of DVD but don’t count on it any time in the near future. The DVD is safe just as the movie theater is safe just as radio is safe.

The DVD’s you already have are going to play in your new Blu-ray DVD player just fine. iTunes would like to see you download the movie instead. The challenge is still how to get that download to the TV since almost no one uses the media center player included on many new computers. More computers are media ready but look around and see how many computers are next to the TV. Right, I thought so. We really get a kick out of seeing laptop manufacturers put cable connections on the laptop like home owners are going to unplug the TV and connect the coax to the laptop. What a total waste of resources! The point here is that there is still some distance to go before it is easy to download and watch shows using computers for the average dad. It is just to easy to drop a DVD into a player and press play or easy to pull up the cable menu and select a movie on demand. It is not as easy for most households and as creatures of habit we like looking through the selections at the video store.

Find a local home theatre installation company who can make the path easier and handle the cabling. Then you can decide if dropping a DVD in the player, which you have to go get, is easier than clicking a download from the internet or your own local video server storage.

As we are in a new year be sure to make a full backup of your data.  Having a year end backup for accounting is pretty common but your entire business should be backed up.

Common Mistakes made by independent businesses.

• Not having a process in place to do a backup
• Not backing up data because it is poorly organized
• Email is usually not stored with your regular files and is often overlooked and missed in a backup process
• Email address backup is missed because data not stored with your regular files
• Only having 1 tape or just never changing it.
• Only having 1 hard drive if using a hard drive to store the backup
• Never testing the backup

If you are running Windows 2003 server,any version a backup utility is included with options for full system recovery but you need to be sure to also run a special backup called ASR.

Windows XP Professional includes a backup utility automatically installed where for XP Home the backup isn’t automatically installed.

Depending on where you are backing up and the media type most people benefit from enahnced backup and restore software.  Teh built-in backup utilities work but are what they are.  In the case of servers and ASR recovery there are some real gotchya’s.  Microsoft does not consider them critical but the restore process can be much more difficult than need be.

If you have employees on the payroll not able to work for a single day due to backup failure that is very expensive lost time so it is important to have a backup, test the backup on a periodic basis and store multiple copies away from the office.

-Find yourself a good IT consulting firm who will listen and deliver your business solutions that add real value and  process improvement.

Voice over IP or VOIP has been around at the telecom level for a number of years and has well known standards for call aggregation.  The new offering aimed at your office need more analysis.  Consumer and small office VOIP are much more sensitive than the robust offerings telco to telco.  There are a number of issues to consider before making your next Internet bandwidth and phone line purchase.

Companies are available providing single and combination solutions.  One size does not fit all is clearly the message of importance.  The few dollars saved on low cost VOIP may not be worth the savings.

-Find yourself a good IT consulting firm who will listen and deliver your business solutions that add real value and  process improvement.

Voice over IP or VOIP has been around at the telecom level for a number of years and has well known standards for call aggregation.  The new offering aimed at your office need more analysis.  Consumer and small office VOIP are much more sensitive that the robust offerings telco to telco.  There are a number of issues to consider before making your next Internet bandwidth and phone line purchase.

There are companies providing single and combination solutions.  One size does not fit all is clearly the message of importance.  The few dollars saved on low cost VOIP may not be worth the savings.

-Find yourself a good IT consulting firm who will listen and deliver your business solutions that add real value and  process improvement.

Managed Services seemed like the Holy Grail for distributors and IT service companies as everyone wanted to add managed services to their profit picture, so why is revenue falling?   Offering and selling managed services sounds like a great thing and managing your network is important.

Managed Services seemed like the Holy Grail for distributors and IT service companies as everyone wanted to add managed services to their profit picture.   Offering and selling managed services sounds like a great thing and managing your network is important.

If you are a network service provider managing networks for others then you are familiar with the companies barking the most about their services.   N-Able, Level Platforms, Silverback Technologies and Kaseya are the most prominent companies in the news. The current but shifting methodology is to place a small computer appliance at the client site where it talks to the local network and “phones home” the information to the IT company that sold it to them.  The appliance or service provides monitoring and reporting for the local network priced by device. This is billed monthly and generates a recurring revenue for the IT company.

Revenue stream thinking is wonderful and if you can get your customer to pay you monthly for the service so your job as an IT company is easier that’s all the better but it’s not really making the clients business better.  The truth about 95% of the networks installed is the monitoring and reporting is already in place on the network servers. If you run Linux or Microsoft Windows 2003 server, standard, small business edition(SBS) or enterprise the tools are already there with alerting email etc… Management reports are very useful and the managed service vendors customize them based on personal tastes.

It is no surprise then that the prices for the IT companies to get into the game has plummeted. Silverback just reduced the cost of it’s appliance based MSP product offering from $76,000 to $2,999.  This should tell investors and others just how much fluff is involved here.  Perhaps this entry fee should fall down to $299-499.  Others have also had huge drops.  The cost is spread out among clients and is designed to make the IT company have a single “console” to view the status of it’s client base.  That’s a benefit to the IT company. These MSP tools help the IT company a lot more than they help the client.

-Find yourself a good IT consulting firm who will listen and deliver your business solutions that add real value and  process improvement.

Everything is getting faster, the news tells us that everyday. Processors are flying, however hard disk drives are still very sluggish in comparison and we haven’t seen any real performance gains in 5 years. Drives have gotten larger in capacity but the disk is still spinning at the same rate of 7200 rpm or 10,000 on average. The widening gap between processor performance and hard drives now means your real world results could very well be gated by the hard drive. If you bought that special of the week chances are the corners were cut with a lower performing hard drive which can make a noticeable difference in pc performance tests and in actual daily use.

Microsoft Vista has a new feature to help with the gap called ready boost but we haven’t seen a benefit in terms of performance and don’t believe it is worth the hassle to deploy. There is also an issue that many USB memory sticks will not meet the demand of ready boost so it fails to configure and load. This is not a microsoft issue but an issue of the USB memory stick manufacturers using slow chips. We have seen very wide differences in USB memory stick performance.

Another interesting scenario to help with these issues is hybrid drives but manufacturers are reluctant to put much into this because INTEL has created a “Turbo Memory” model that will be supported by laptop and other motherboard manufacturers. This promises to over come the USB issue limited to 480mbit on the buss with PCix performance of 1000mbit. The memory will also be designed for the high write demand whereas USB drives by design are really intended to be light weight data storage.

Unlike USB flash drives the INTEL turbo memory should give a battery life kick to notebooks as the throughput is optimized and will reduce the demand on the hard drive. This has several pluses in that the hard drive works less, creates less heat means the fans work less and you have a triple play for improved battery life without losing performance. In fact you should experience a boost compared with systems not utilizing INTEL turbo memory capable systems. Most newer laptops will have a mini-PCI slot ready for your Turbo Memory.

Speed On!