A new online payment portal is now active allowing clients to view and pay invoices online. Gone are the days of wondering what invoices are outstanding! You can now login at any time of the day, or night, to our new payment portal and all of the information is just a few clicks away. This new tool will improve communication between our accounting department as well as you and our clients to ensure that you are always fully aware of the status of your account.

In the new payment portal, you will be able to pay outstanding invoices, setup reoccurring payments, as well as view your existing service requests and make new ones.

The website for this new portal is http://pay.georgejon.com – If you wish to have access granted to this payment portal, please contact me with the information for the contact in your company that should be granted access.

We are always striving at improving our relationship with our clients and welcome any feedback that you may have. Please do not hesitate to reach out to use with any questions.

Regards,

Kaya Kowalczyk

Kaya Kowalczyk / Operations Manager

312.698.7133 / 312.948.2607 Fax

www.georgejon.com  

George Jon Inc. is the preferred network planning, installation and management partner for kCura Corporation’s Relativity software program. Relativity is an industry-leading, host-based document management solution for the legal industry, a program which requires significant technological expertise to optimally install, configure and migrate data.

We will be at Relativity Fest talking with Premier Hosting Partners (PHPs) — stop by and see us and learn how we can build a state-of-the-art eDiscovery data network for you and your business.

September 11th, 2001 was a day that changed our lives forever. It gave us orange alerts at airports and taught us the 3-1-1 rule. If you travel a lot you know what I’m referring to. For businesses it brought even more things to the surface. What would happen to your organization if a disaster wiped out your office?

Fortune 2000 companies started looking into expensive disaster recovery and business continuity planning. For enterprise organizations, it involves redundant networks, data centers and hot sites. It was a very expensive venture but it was built into the next years budgets knowing that there was too much risk to manage without a solid contigency plan.

However, small and mid-sized businesses have the same risks. There may be less zeros on the balance sheets but the importance of staying open and operating is equally important to the business owners, executives and employees of smaller organizations. Post 9/11, innovative companies emerged to produce technologies that would address this very need yet be affordable to the 1.2 million mid-size businesses (100-500 employees) in America.

Double-Take Software is one of those companies that created a product that is affordable to small and mid-size businesses yet offers the same functionality and reliability as F2000 companies employ in their IT infrastructure.  Using Double-Take technology, you can duplicate your servers and data off-site in real-time so that your data and business is safe in the event of a catastrophic physical disaster. 

 
If you do not have a disaster recovery plan for your business, ask yourself how many days can you go without access to your network? Would your business survive without your IT infrastructure, without your applications, without your data for a day, for a week, for 2 weeks, for a month.  Most businesses would be in trouble within 2 weeks if they lost their data.

Now ask yourself what being able to continue to operate off-site is worth. It’s worth investigating just what your options are and how much that would cost to have the insurance of a comprehensive disaster recovery plan in place. 

George Jon + Associates is a Double-Take Software partner and available for a consultation. For a consultation, contact us at sales@georgejon.com or speak to your technician about it.

We’re a small business trying to accomplish the same tasks as a big business. So we know that good organization can save us time finding things so we can move on quickly to the next task. As e-mail has become one of the tools we use most in conducting business — in fact, some of us hyperventilate if we don’t have it available. So keeping your e-mails organized is crucial to a good work day.

Whether you’re already using Outlook 2007 or still using Outlook 2003, you can stay on top of your mail. Here are some tools in Outlook that you can use to manage your e-mail. You can use one of these tools — or a combination of tools — to help shrink your Inbox and make it easier to find the information you need.

1. Group similar messages in folders
By creating new mail folders you can group messages related to each other. For example, you can group messages by topic, project, contact, or other categories that make sense to you. You can even create a folder for all the messages from your manager or that include tasks that you have to complete.

2. Create Search Folders to find messages fast
Search Folders are a quick and convenient way to look at predefined collections of e-mail messages. They don’t actually store any messages themselves, but instead are virtual folders that offer a view of all the messages stored in your mailbox depending on the attributes you’ve defined. Outlook provides default Search folders—such as Unread Mail—but you can also create your own. For instance, you can use Search Folders to help you find all the information related to a particular project, an important client, or an upcoming conference.

3. Sort messages quickly
You can find messages in mailbox folders more quickly by changing how they’re sorted in your e-mail folders. For example, you can arrange your e-mail by date, sender, file size, or even by conversation, which pulls up all messages by the subject line.

4. Route mail efficiently using mailbox rules
By creating rules for Outlook, you can automatically perform actions on both incoming and outgoing messages based on the criteria you establish. For instance, you can automatically forward to your manager all messages sent by a certain person as soon as they arrive, assign the category Sales to all messages you send that have the word “sales” in the Subject line, and much, much more. Routing mail efficiently not only organizes your mail for you—but also frees up your time from performing routing tasks. Learn more about how to create and manage rules in Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003.

5. Reduce unwanted e-mail with junk filters
Keep distracting and unwanted messages out of your inbox by using Outlook Junk E-Mail filters. These filters send e-mail flagged as junk to a separate mail folder under your Mailbox. You can review the contents of this folder to ensure no legitimate messages have been sent there, and if so, you can adjust the filter to avoid flagging such messages in the future. Learn more about the Junk E-mail Filter in Outlook 2003 —and the improved Junk Mail filter in Outlook 2007.

6. Lay on the color
One quick easy way to distinguish between e-mail messages is to color code them. By using color, you can quickly identify messages from certain contacts by customizing your Inbox to automatically color messages. For example, it’s an easy way to identify important messages from a key customer, your manager, or an important contact. Even better, it’s quick and easy.

7. Flag for follow up 

You can flag e-mail messages, tasks, and more with colored Quick Flags to help classify them or mark them for action. Flags can remind you to follow up on an issue, indicate a request for someone else, or set a reminder for a message or contact. Best yet, they make organizing your mail folders a breeze, because you know exactly what to do—and when to do it.

We keep hearing about the slumping economy and a market sitting in limbo (or worse) while we try and figure out what’s going to happen next in the business world.

Here’s the thing: the economy cycles. Sometimes we are up and sometimes we are down. But what goes down must come back up — economic Darwinism. Strong companies find ways to reduce costs while executing growth strategies to be increasingly competitive during tumultuous times and thus ideally leveraged for future success.

2011 has been much like every year for the Chicago Cubs – a building year. Our money is on 2012. Spend time evaluating the right technologies, and yes, making investments to leverage your IT resources and your staff’s productivity.

Here are a few reasons you should invest in technology now for a better future:

1. Consistency in best practices: Keep the good things that work and have proven ROI in the past and dump the things that don’t work. So if refresh cycles on your hardware showed a positive return in the past, keep doing it. Having powerful hardware that is under a good warranty is a good proactive measure to take—especially if your IT infrastructure’s warranty coverage is expiring soon, consider new more powerful and efficient servers that are available today.

2. Stay competitive: This is especially true for smaller companies. Technology gives you strategic advantage. SMBs today have access to fantastic and affordable technologies that are easier to adopt than for larger companies. And let’s face it, the SMB sector is going to be where the biggest boom can happen for the economy. Larger companies are in the midst of real internal chaos and that weakens them. SMBs can really leverage technology today and be just as competitive as a F1000 company if well positioned. Plus, as a smaller company, you can be more flexible and quicker to adapt to changing trends and have lower costs to consider.

3. Cheaper in the long run: Money is cheap today. There are many leasing options that are available and banks are looking to lend to good companies. Uncle Sam is also making some tax changes so that companies can make some expenditures and see some benefits. It’s a good time to talk to your accountant about any changes and how they can impact your bottom line. You can finance new hardware, software and even implementation to get new technology in your door without having to put out a boatload of cash out front.

4. The world’s on sale: We’ve seen this happen in the retail sector, it’s the simple basics of supply and demand. There’s a bunch of supply and low demand right now. That means that prices are low and manufacturers are desperate to keep inventory moving. You can get bargains right now and low financing so SMBs can take this opportunity to make lemonade out of lemons. With companies like Dell and Microsoft struggling, it’s a good time to negotiate and invest in smart technologies.

5. Americans love a comeback story: Just like Brittney Spears still has fans, so will the economy. We will bounce back and you want to be the company prepared for the future. This is a time to really hone your skills, learn some new moves, and get in the game. This is the time it’s most crucial to be sharp. You want to be ready when we come out of this slump to go full force and do some catch up.    

It’s at these troubled times that we as people and we as a country show the courage of our character. Burying our heads in the sand isn’t going to change the situation — it will only get us deeper. So lift your head high and learn about new technologies that are developing to help you gain advantage in your industry. From faster PCs, to more energy efficient servers, or virtualization to save space, or adding SANs to be more data efficient, or upgrading to new OS systems that have new productivity enhancements for your staff, or hey, invest in your employees so you can get the most out of your staff. 

As always, your partners at George Jon + Associates are here to help you sort through the latest and greatest technologies to help you stay competitive and ahead of the curve. If you have questions, concerns, or just want to chat about technology, shoot us an email or give us a call. We’re chockful of techy information and dying to share and help as best as we can.

Viruses keep IT companies in business. Though it’s not the kind of busy that IT technicians like to be. Technicians want to keep moving forward and employing more challenging technologies so they can keep playing with more neat toys.

Unfortunately, our Help Desk techs spend a lot of time cleaning up computers even though we deploy anti-virus software on all workstations we deploy. The reality is that hackers are, despite the misconceptions, very hard working individuals. They are driven by the intrigue and challenge of developing more stealth applications that work under the surface. See, if you don’t know you’re infected, then you won’t make an effort to have your computer cleaned and the longer they can sit on your computer acquiring more information.