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Volume 3, Issue 6 - June, 2008 - © 2009 by Moose Logic, All Rights Reserved
Cover Story: Is Your Company Getting Slandered Online?
3 Easy Steps To Get 7 Years Of Hassle-Free Service Out Of Your Laser Printer
There’s a New Game In Town: The Citrix Delivery CenterTM
A Bumper Crop of Spaghetti
We Have a Winner!
Moose Logic Coming Events
(Moose Views is a monthly newsletter prepared by Moose Logic to bring you information and tips on maintaining a trouble-free network)
Is Your Company Getting Slandered Online?
Do You Know What People Are Saying About You Online? New “Online Identity Managers” Are Becoming A Must For Business Owners Who Need To Keep Their Reputation Clean...A recent front-page story in the Washington Post brought to light a fast growing trend in today’s digital world: online identity management.
According to the article, Sue Scheff, a consultant to parents of troubled teens, was getting slandered online after one of her clients turned on her, calling her “a con and a fraud,” and accusing her of taking kickbacks and destroying people’s lives. Negative comments were being posted on online bulletin boards, forums, and threatening videos were posted up on YouTube for the world to see.
Even though Scheff sued for defamation and won an $11.3 million verdict, the attacks worsened. To resolve this situation, Scheff was forced to hire ReputationDefender, a PR firm that cleaned up her reputation online.
While the costs for hiring this firm were steep (reputation management firms charge $15,000 to $100,000 for their services), the cost of her time, litigation and reputation make their fees seem like a drop in the bucket.
So what should you do if you are an average Joe small business with limited resources? Fortunately, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and you can easily monitor your image online for free with a few simple steps.
First, the easiest way to check your online reputation is to Google your name or the name of your company and see what appears. Next, set up a Google Alert on your name and your company name. You’ll be alerted by e-mail whenever you or your organization has been mentioned in a blog, by the media, or in an online forum.
Next, work on getting your company’s web site to come up first in search engines. If you own the top positions online, negative media may not show up on the first listing when your name is Googled. (This is called “Search Engine Optimization,” and it isn’t necessarily easy—but worth it!)
To do this, create a profile of your expertise using social bookmarking tools and news aggregators such as del.icio.us and Newsvine. Contribute to online forums and write articles for user-generated content sites such as Squidoo. You can even create book and product reviews at Amazon.com to help establish your authority on a particular topic.
You can also create a blog. It’s best to do it on your own site, but you can also use a free blog hosting site, and then link that to your main web site. Post frequently and make sure your posts are key-word relevant.
Other obvious ways to put a positive spin online about your company is to create content pages on social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook and MySpace.
Finally, be very careful about posting any incriminating evidence about you or your company online or sending e-mails with incriminating information, tasteless jokes, or messages that could easily be misconstrued out of context.
You don’t want a search on your name to bring up pictures of you in compromising situations or sexist, racist, or off-color jokes you thought were only being sent to your friends. If you wouldn’t want it posted to a billboard, don’t post it or send it via e-mail.
3 Easy Steps To Get 7 Years Of Hassle-Free Service Out Of Your Laser Printer
Printers - the necessary evil of every office. From paper jams and error messages, to problems like smearing, misfeeds, and ghosting, printers can really make your blood pressure rise.Plus, it’s easy to sink thousands of dollars into maintenance and repairs. If you want to avoid common printer problems AND save yourself a small fortune on replacements and repairs, follow these 3 easy steps:
Keep It Clean
There is no faster way to gunk up a laser printer and cause printing problems than by letting it get dirty.
On a monthly basis, use compressed air to blow out the inside of the printer. Remove the toner cartridge for better access, and don’t forget to do the back if it is accessible. It also helps to take a vacuum to the outside. If you print labels or use any other type of specialty media like transparencies, use rubbing alcohol to clean the rollers inside the printer. (Note: I’m talking about the rubber rollers—not the imaging “drums” that, these days, are typically built into the toner cartridges. Those should never be touched under any circumstances!)
Do Your Maintenance
You can almost infinitely extend your printers lifespan by doing the regular maintenance suggested by the manufacturer.
This includes replacing rollers, filters, and occasionally replacing the fuser (the printer’s internal furnace.) Here’s a little money-saving secret: you only need to do this type of maintenance at 1.5 to 2 times the manufacturer’s usage recommendation. In other words, if your printer’s manufacturer says to replace rollers every 100,000 pages, you typically only need to do so every 150,000 to 200,000 pages.
Use a Surge Protector
Nothing will send your printer to the bone yard faster than an electrical surge caused by lightning or other issues on the power grid.
When internal components are fried, it is usually cheaper to buy a new printer than it is to fix the existing one. It is easy to protect yourself with a $25 surge protector. DO NOT plug a laser printer into a UPS or other battery backup system. The printer’s power draw is too much for a battery to handle.
There’s a New Game In Town: The Citrix Delivery CenterTM
The Citrix Delivery Center is real, it’s available now, and we’ll have it running in our ITEC booth.
What is the Citrix Delivery Center? It’s a new model for delivering (not deploying) desktops and applications to users. It’s based on a few fairly simple concepts:
- The old ways of deploying desktop Operating Systems and applications are awkward, inefficient, and expensive.
- The time your PC performed the best was when you first turned it on—before you installed any applications on it! So stop installing applications, and separate the delivery of Operating Systems from the delivery of applications.
- Not all desktop needs are best filled by XenApp running on a Terminal Server—but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consolidate them into your data center. The same issues of centralized control and management, information security, and having a single point for application delivery that originally drove “Server-Based Computing” are now driving “Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.”
Stream the Operating System to your servers (physical or virtual) with Provisioning Server. It will guarantee consistency in your environment, and give you what is in effect an “undo” button when you have to apply a service pack or critical patches.
Stream your desktop Operating System image to virtual PCs running on the XenDesktop platform. Then stream the applications on demand to those virtual PCs—as well as to any physical PCs, like notebooks, that you need to retain. The off-line access option will allow a streamed application to continue to function when the PC is disconnected from the network—but only for the time you specify.
You’ll need shared storage to fully leverage this functionality. That’s where our partnership with DataCore comes in. Our ITEC booth will be powered by a pair of DataCore SANmelody iSCSI storage nodes, and we’d be happy to show those to you as well. See you at ITEC!
A Bumper Crop of Spaghetti
In the 1950s spaghetti was considered an exotic food in some countries, including the United Kingdom. So, as
an April Fools joke, the BBC ran a story about the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest on April 1, 1957.
The show was narrated by distinguished BBC broadcaster Richard Dimbleby and showed realistic film footage of Swiss farm workers harvesting strands of noodles from spaghetti trees. The segment went on to report that because of the mild winter—and the fact that the pesky spaghetti weevil had been subdued– the Swiss were experiencing a bumper crop of spaghetti that year.
During the broadcast, the narrator remarked that many people were baffled at how each strand of spaghetti could be grown exactly the same length. Obviously this was due to dedicated farmers and their hard work in perfecting their crops
Although this was an April Fools hoax, hundreds of viewers called the BBC wanting to know where they could find spaghetti saplings so they could try growing it themselves. The BBC’s reporter replied: Place a sprig of spaghetti into a tomato tin and hope for the best.
We Have A Winner!
For the last two months, we’ve been running our first annual “Fun With Fenwick” contest, where you were invited to have fun dressing up Fenwick J. Moose in new and unusual ways.We’re happy to say that a winner has been selected, and the winning entry will be on display in our ITEC booth. If you don’t make it to ITEC, stay tuned, because we’ll also reveal the winner in next month’s issue of Moose Views.
