Last month I wrote a comparison of Microsoft’s Office 365 and Google Apps.  Microsoft 365 had just been released from a beta version and I expected there to be a lot of buzz about the new service.  Office can be considered the “golden boy” of Microsoft’s software line and is trusted by many and with 365 being a cloud based service I could only expect a lot of speculation.  But my intuition failed me.  It seems as if Office 365 has come and gone without much buzz, which made me even more curious about the product.  Was it not living up to expectation?

What is RAID?

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) was first introduced in 1987 by David A. Patterson, Garth A. Gibson and Randy Katz at the University of California. More importantly, RAID is a well known and widely used form of data protection and disaster recovery.

Alex Straffin is a Senior IT Consultant and has been working at NSK Inc. since 2007.  As a Help Desk representative in the Boston Office, he is there to personally solve client issues.  Recently, Alex and other IT Consultants teamed up together to solve a major issue when a client’s email server became a “spambot.” According to Alex, Spambots are when a “server gets infected and sends out mass spam messages.”  So how did this happen? Email servers act as a centralized place where every message gets sent through.  And before any messages can be sent out, they must be checked by an unbiased database like CISCO Iron Port in order to prevent spam from being sent.  However, if one message gets reported, then the whole server becomes blacklisted.  So when the infected account was reported, it resulted in the whole server shutting down so no messages could be sent out.  It was our great team of IT Consultants who saw the issue and notified the client.  How did it get resolved?  “It is very difficult to get off the blacklist,” Alex says “but we managed to find a solution by changing the email server’s IP address.” And what is his tip on preventing issues like this?  “Buy Malwarebytes Pro” is Alex’s suggestion.  This is an anti-malware application that not only cleans your machine but will run periodic scans as well.

As I check my email every morning I am spammed with what seems like every online discount deal known to man.  After immediately deleting the morning round of the email blasts I always ask myself, “how did it get this bad?”  Well, it all began with one.  I originally joined Gilt Group, which is an online service that features great discounts on designer brands.  Soon after, I found a similar service, then another.  Then I discovered Groupon, then Living Social.  Soon I was a member on ten different discount sites that all offered me the same thing: cheaper clothes, food and travel.  It took a company like Gilt only one year to go from expanding its range beyond clothes but to travel, local discounts and as an online meat retailer as well.  Thus becoming an almost identical service to the rest.

Mauricio Cornejo has been employed at NSK inc. since February of 2010.  You may have talked to him a few times as he primarily works at our Help Desk.  Recently, he upgraded a client’s ACT! database (a contact manager) from ACT! 4 to ACT! 2011.  Basically, this is a switch from software released in 1994 to the most recent 2011 version.  It was a bit trickier than normal due to the huge difference in upgrade versions. “Since the information has to be converted, it can actually break the system” explains Mauricio.  And if it were to break? Mauricio says that “it would take lots of time and communication between us and the client in order to fix the issue.”  Thankfully he was able to convert all the information breakage free!