A few months ago a number of our clients were surveyed in depth by a third party firm about what they thought about CSI.   We are happy to report that the reviews were extremely favorable.   Our thanks to everyone who shared their thoughts.  When asked what CSI could do better, many respondents said that they wished they could essentially crawl into our brains and leverage even more of our technical expertise to help them with their technology problems.

As Hurricane Irene approached New York, CSI used our 24x7x365 Paladin Monitoring service to help our clients prepare their computers and networks for the impending hurricane.  We were able to quickly identify all the uninterruptible power  supplies (aka batteries) under management which had bad batteries or other hardware issues.

On September 6, 1979 my father and I entered the world of business opening the first store in the region dedicated to personal computers.  I was 17 and had just left for the University of Texas at Austin after helping my dad setup the store and left him to run it while I was in school.

A good article from Tech Republic on troubleshooting connectivity issues with the ARP cache

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/networking/look-to-the-arp-cache-when-troubleshooting-flaky-connectivity-issues/4690?tag=nl.e102

Malicious PDF Documents can be a threat to your business

I can't tell you how many people tell me that they never worry about clicking on Adobe PDF file documents because "they are safe".  They are shocked when I tell them that infected PDF files is one of the major ways viruses and trojans are brought into a business.

Dead is still dead, but in Windows 8 the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) will be friendlier "sad" face!

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/blue-screen-death-gets-new-life-windows-8

QR Codes are those square bar codes you see popping up on billboards and advertising.   If you have a smart phone and download a QR reader application, you can take a picture of the QR code.  The QR code will be converted to text.  This might be a web page.

With Google trying to break into the mainstream social networking market with Google Plus, Facebook has been busy with a number of changes of their own.    One of the most controversal is a new feature in the top right side of the screen which allows you to eavesdrop on your friends and see things they are sharing with others on Facebook that have nothing to do with you.

Here's an article from Novell on the features added to the new version of GroupWise coming in the fourth quarter. It sounds like there are some nice features being added.

http://www.novell.com/communities/node/13309/groupwise-ascot-coming-soon

Where the line should be drawn between employees using the Internet (and their time) at work for personal use is always a source of great controversy. We all know certain on-line activities definitely effect employee productivity. However, this research paper suggests not all employee personal Internet use is bad for productivity.