Syndeo Technologies - IT MANAGED SERVICES

WordPress MultiSite is a very powerful feature which allows you to create and manage sub-sites. For example, this is useful if you have to manage multiple Client sites with different themes and users but at the same time you are able to manage the whole site from one central location without creating separate sites for each Client.

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For a while now Amazon has been offering a free micro configuration of Ubuntu on S3. This is a great opportunity to set up a simple development and test environment, for example for WordPress or a Web Site. Using s3cmd you can then back up your server to S3.

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To address the needs of our growing business we decided it was time to replace our home-grown IT Business Management Software Platform with something more customer focused, scalable and user friendly. After a long drawn out selection process with several vendors we finally decided on the one we thought would be most suitable for Syndeo Technologies as we continue to expand: Autotask.

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I struggled for a couple of days setting up a vsftpd server on an Amazon EC2 Server running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and in principal the setup is relatively easy. However, recent security updates which seem impossible to fix unless you recompile the source code and adding this to your vsftpd configuration file kept me struggling for a few days

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Has your computer ever crashed unexpectedly and all your information is lost?  Have you ever typed a document on your phone and then your phone fell in the water?  Even simpler; do you have a tablet that doesn’t have a memory drive in it, and you cannot print from it?  Google is here to fix all of these problems!  Google has recently come out with a new edition called google drive.  It is basically a flash drive internally within Google.  Upload your files to Google Drive and save them.  If your laptop dies, your documents are saved in Google.  Some great things about this new edition is that Google Drive can be located anywhere you are.  It is available anywhere Internet is, on your phone, on someone else’s computer, at home, at work; wherever you can connect to Google.  The point of Google Drive is to eliminate external hard drives and your documents are never lost.  You can choose to share documents with certain people, and have everyone edit the document, or you can keep it to yourself.  This is helpful for businesses when one person cannot be there, they can still work on the document from miles away.  There is a small fee however.  The first 5GB are free and then after that a customer can upgrade to 25GB for less than $2.50 a month.  At an average rate, an external hard drive is close to $60.  You would have to have Google Drive for 1 year for that to amount to an external hard drive.

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Does your company host webinars?  Here are some tips to invite people to your webinars via social media sites.  Since social media is on the up-rise, marketing via twitter, facebook, and linkedin is crucial, and is a host for free marketing.  When telling people about your webinars via twitter make sure about a month before your webinar you are posting catchy phrases 2-3 times a week so that people remember about your event.  You should tweet the date and time of your webinars to remind people of them, thus bringing in your twitter friends.  Through Facebook you should be posting the link to your webinar, once a week, within the month leading up to the date.  Keep in mind that constant repetition of your webinar date will remind your facebook friends of it.  For LinkedIn your should be finding professional groups that are relevant to what the webinar is about.  Post a link about the topic of your webinar to entice people to watching it.  This should be done once or twice in each group, the month of your webinar.  Hope these helpful tips helped your webinar connectivity with your social media friends!

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We all know that passwords are not 100% secure, and sometimes people use passwords that they know are not secure just because they are easy to remember.  The new technology being looked at for password protection is brain waves.  This will be done by showing specific pictures and depending how the brain reacts to them will be the password.  The only problem now is that to get brain waves, the brain needs to be connected to a machine that reads them.  Would you use your brain waves as a password for your computer or iPad?  How about with a heartbeat?  Everyone has a different heartbeat especiall when shown images.  Which would you prefer?  Or do you want to stay old school with a typed password.

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We set up a Citrix XenApp 6 EVA server for a Client recently and ran into some snags setting up Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 on the system. First, Citrix published a Knowledge Base entry with a Step by Step guide on how to prepare Office for the installation here: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX124565

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Google’s recent release that hundreds of email accounts based in China have been hacked (including some U.S and Chinese government officials!) causes GMAIL apprehension for many users. The hackers are said to have stolen passwords and monitored email traffic.

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Does your company have issues with employees using social media at work?  Its almost impossible to stop now.  Between access through smart phones and through computers there is no controlling the spread of social media.  Instead of trying to stop it, go with it.  Create a social media page specifically for your employees and your company.  Whether it be Facebook, twitter, or google +, create one for your employees to talk to each other. This will increase the level of communicating and decrease the use of personal social media.  Two great social media sites for doing this are Google + and Foursquare.  Google + is similar to Facebook, however you can put your friends in circles and communicate to them circle by circle.  Create google + accounts for your employees and put them in a “co-workers” circle.  Foursquare on the other hand is more of a way to communicate with your employees while they are on the road.  Keep updates on them and keep them in the loop while they are out of the office.  Consumerism of social media will just be a process that companies have to adopt for internal use, and now with all the choices of social media, companies can choose the one that suits them best.  What social media does your company use?

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