NowITWorks.net

We are pleased to announce the first winner of our quarterly Customer Survey drawing. The winner of a new Amazon Kindle is: Walt Perron from Benhaven School. Congratulations!

We appreciate all of the feedback we have received thus far. We hope our customers will continue to fill out these surveys to be entered into the next drawing, which will take place on December 1st, 2010.

Have a great weekend everyone!

“The temp accidentally deleted a file – can I get it back?”

A networking associate called the Now IT Works help desk one morning with that very question. He had a temporary employee in the office who was doing some clerical work when she accidentally deleted a file from the public folders.

How Now IT Works Was Able to Help

As it turns out, the temp didn’t delete the folder but simply dragged-and-dropped it into another folder on the public drive. Now IT Works can help you set high-level safeguards so that only certain employees are able to make changes, add or delete files to existing folders.

Also, your Windows-based server has the ability to monitor critical folders and log entries with the date, time and name of the employee who made the changes.

Clients who subscribe to our Blue Steel service can have this feature activated easily.

Over the weekend, many Fantasy Football drafts took place around the country. In honor of that, we’ve dusted off an old, but still interesting blog post about fantasy football and how it affects your business/office -

• The average fantasy football player spends an average of 1.19 hours per week working on their team, while at work. Companies lose about $45.22 in wages each week, per employee.

Example: If there are 5 employees within your company and they spend an hour each week on their fantasy football teams, after 17 weeks of play (not including playoffs), it would cost your company approximately $3,843.70 each season.

And let’s not forget that Fidelity had no problem firing four employees last year, all of whom were caught participating in their fantasy football league while at work.

There are services available to restrict internet usage during high-peak times; March Madness, playoffs. If you are interested in learning more, please contact a Now IT Works representative.

• This is an older list but still good – The top 100 Geeks You Should be Following on Twitter. If you aren’t following Wil Wheaton, you don’t know what you’re missing (Wired)

• Coming soon: 3D television from Toshiba but without the dorky glasses (Tech News World)

• CNN has been nice enough to list the Top 50 websites of 2010, in the areas of health & fitness, education and sports (CNN)

• Looking for royalty-free music to use on all your home made YouTube videos? Look no further! (Geeks Are Sexy)

Facebook has introduced a new feature that allows users to use the GPS on their phone to let their friends know where they are. Facebook Places is the new app, available for smart-phones that works similar to FourSquare. The user can use this app to meet up with friends or find out if they are in the area.

While social media can be useful to stay in touch with friends & family, would you want everyone to know where you are, at all times?

It’s going to make avoiding annoying friends and ditching family picnics a whole lot tougher!

Did you know that web-surfing & personal communications accounts for 27% of the average work day?

The average worker wastes over 2 hours* each day checking their Facebook accounts, downloading music and communicating with friends. Without the proper precautions in place, they have the capabilities to install programs on their computer, some of which can carry viruses to your business network.

Not only can these applications put your technology at risk but lost productivity can cost as much as $1000 per month, per employee.

During your initial setup with Now IT Works, your Account Manager will review all of the necessary software it takes to run your business, along with the proper web surfing policy for your employees.

(*source: Salary.com)

After a lengthy break from the web, the Now IT Works team is back and ready to put our blog back on the map!

Here is what we’ve been up to:

• Our new employee Dale, the “man behind the scenes”, has been with us for a few months now, working on proactive monitoring and the execution of large-scale customer projects.

• Dispatch Manager Amie recently became a CompTIA Certified Project + Manager. She has been assisting with the planning phases of customer projects and utilizing these skills in her dispatch world as well.

• Our Now IT Works website is under construction! The new and improved site is set to roll out early this Fall. Be sure to visit us at www.nowitworks.com

• We have started sending Client Surveys after the completion of service tickets. If you are a customer and receive one of these surveys, be sure to fill it out and you’ll be in the running to win an iPod Shuffle!

A special thank you to all of our readers for sticking with us. Have a great weekend everyone!

Today in technology history -

• 1851: a patent for the sewing machine was granted to Isaac Singer

• 1977: the first free flight of the Space Shuttle Enterprise

• 1981: IBM releases the first Personal Computer

(Source: Wikipedia)

Our help desk received a call one morning  from a prospective customer who was in a panic. He had just sent out a very important email from his phone, to a client and received a bounce-back notice that the email had not been delivered. When he got to the office, he learned that no one had access to Outlook so he called Now IT Works. 

As it turns out:

As a Now IT Works client, your servers are being monitored on many levels:

The Now IT Works blog comes back to life!