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Hosted PBX for Small and Medium Businesses

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Communication is the one of the most important footholds for small businesses because if small and medium sized businesses do not have the latest technology infrastructure, they cannot do business. Hosted PBX systems has brought a major change in the way small and medium sized businesses communicate.

Small and medium businesses need leads. These businesses can use their business phone to integrate all business activities. Hosted PBX allows for a wide range of features that integrate and back up almost all the business leads and activities. This way there is even less potential for a loss of business opportunities.

Features of Hosted PBX:

  • Unlimited extensions
  • Call Hunt
  • Simultaneous Ring
  • Voicemail
  • calling between extensions,
  • geographical integration
  • Interactive Voice Response
  • toll free number

Hosted PBX is a cost-effective and scalable system that seems to be the perfect fit for small and medium sized businesses giving them a robust communication interface without any physical setup.

For more information on Hosted PBX, contact NPV.

IT Services for the Medical and Healthcare Industry

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In the Healthcare industry technology plays an important role. Healthcare providers need to capture and store the crucial health and treatment information of patients.  IT support has an important place in this industry. With the increase in competition and confidentiality the latest technology and support is needed in the medical sector.

IT companies need to give medical practitioners and health care facilities 24/7/365 monitoring and repair and software management.  Electronic Medical Record (HER), Electronic Health Record (EHR) support services, virus protection, security and protection, are all necessary components to IT support services for the medical industry.

By outsourcing IT services operational cost can be reduced because there is no need to have an on-site technical support center. For more information on medical IT Services, contact NPV.

Education Through Moodle and Wave

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A new piece of software designed to simplify formative and summative tests in higher education has been unveiled. The software, Wave, connects the institution’s LMS with classroom clickers and other devices.

Wave works with both traditional student response systems (classroom clickers) and mobile devices like smart phones, tablets, and laptops to capture real-time responses from students in the institution’s central learning management system. It works with eInstruction clickers or eInstruction’s apps for Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac OS X, supporting up to 1,000 students. The software accepts multiple question types, including multiple choice, multiple select, short answer, and true/false.

At present, the system is designed to support Moodle and Blackboard systems. However, eInstruction indicated that additional systems will be supported this year.

For more information on Moodle and Wave integration, contact NPV.

Campus Technology

Teachers Love Moodle

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The open-source course management package known as Moodle has gained a large following among educators since it launched. In an annual survey, it was voted 11th in the list of Top Tools for Learning 2012 by the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies. Now available on Windows, Mac and Linux, the Moodle project claims 64 million users.

With Moodle, teachers can set up courses, create discussions, assign homework, and assign grades. They can also integrate with external content such as photos or videos, or with applications such as Google Docs. Moodle’s features also include assignment submission, discussion forums, file downloading, instant messaging, an online calendar, news and announcements (college and course level), online quizzes, and a Wiki.

Moodle can scale to handle hundreds of thousands of students given enough server capacity and bandwidth, and a variation called Poodle installs software to a local machine so the app can be used offline. Poodle can even boot off a thumb drive.

Educators have gravitated to the platform, which can be used to manage fully online courses or as an adjunct to traditional face-to-face classroom instruction (“blended learning”).

Moodle has been valuable for even everyday tasks like publishing phone directories and handbooks online. It saves tens of thousands of dollars a year in postage and paper.

In December, Moodle version 2.4 became available for download. According to Moodle, 2.4 includes, among other updates, new icons, improved performance, group assignments for students submitting work as part of a group (and being graded as a group), and directions for handling plug-in updates from the Web interface.

For more information on integrating Moodle, contact NPV.

Information Week

The Role of IT Managed Services

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Every business needs to invest some amount of money in their IT systems. IT systems store, recover, translate and manipulate data that the company holds which allows them to make informed decisions. Without proper and effective management, deadlocks can occur in companies, especially at the time of disasters. Therefore, companies hire IT consultants to help create and implement a disaster recovery plan.

Need for IT services

A disaster recovery plan reduces any chances of downtime during disasters and can improve data recovery. IT companies offer you ideas and ways to improve your IT operations and advise you on how to boost the efficiency of your network and save on costs by outsourcing certain services to a managed IT services provider.

What do managed IT service companies do?

Nowadays, many companies outsource the jobs pertaining to managing and running an IT configuration to a managed IT service provider. This enables their IT employees to focus on more crucial business operations. Often this results in much lower costs.

For more information on managed IT support, contact NPV.

excerpts – Ezine

Do Not Take Data Recovery for Granted

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We have discussed many reasons for data loss in the last several blogs. However, you can also lose  data by taking recovery for granted. This applies to all of those reasons for data loss. This one is pretty simple – simply assuming recovery will work.

Your Other Choice

You remember the age-old saying concerning what happens when we assume. It is particularly apt when discussing data recovery. Don’t assume anything!

Regardless of the technology that you use, it’s important that you periodically test your recovery. Don’t assume because you can write to tape that you can read from that tape. Don’t assume because a dashboard shows you a successful backup status that you can recover that backup. Be paranoid and test.

And then test again.

For more information on data loss and recovery, contact NPV.

UniTrends

Losing Your Data from Computer Disasters

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Shortcut to Losing Your Data

Disasters are not a leading cause of data loss by any means. Data loss due to disasters occurs no more than 1% to 3% of the time. In order to avoid losing data, do not focus on the relative rarity of disasters and ignore the severe consequences when a disaster strikes.

What to do to avoid data loss from disasters

Why don’t people walk around outside in thunderstorms? The odds of getting struck by lightning are pretty low. The estimated odds in any given year are 1 in 500,000. Why? Because the consequences of being struck by lightning are very high. The odds of death are 1 in 10; the odds of disability approach 9 in 10.

The odds of data loss due to a natural disaster are relatively low; however, the consequences are severe. In order to safeguard your data, you need to have a disaster recovery plan for your environment. A major part of that disaster recovery plan is protecting data.

There are two basic schemes for this: tape-based rotational archiving and electronic-based replication of data to an off-premise site. We advise looking an integrated D2D2x approach whereby you can use disk, tape, or electronic replication concurrently to optimize your overall spending in support of true disaster recovery.

Unitrends

Protect Against Computer Viruses

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An easy way to losing your data is to neglect to install a firewall and anti-virus software.  Computer viruses rangefrom the annoying to those that threaten not only the systems of your organization but your organization’s reputation as well. The easiest way to lose your data with respect to computer viruses is to not install a firewall and anti-virus software. Anther way to insure 100% infection when a virus occurs is to make sure that all of your systems operate using Windows – not just your PCs but your servers and your backup servers as well.

Other Options

In order to protect your data you will of course have a firewall and install anti-virus software. From a backup perspective, the important thing here is to operate your backup and disaster recovery software on a non-Windows platform.

Vendors ship their backup software on Windows platforms for one reason – they can make the most money with the least expense because Windows is so ubiquitous. If you take a step back and think about it, however, it just doesn’t make sense to run your “protection” software on the same operating system that is relentlessly under attack by malicious people.

For help to protect against data loss, contact NPV.

Unitrends

Data Loss Through Theft

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Theft is another cause of data loss. Theft manifests itself either via a “data spill” in which data isn’t lost but instead made available to third-parties for whom the data wasn’t intended or in outright destruction. For the purposes of this blog, we’re going to limit our discussion to outright destruction of data.

 

The destruction of data is rarely performed by a relatively disinterested “hacker”; instead, it is most often performed by a disgruntled employee or ex-employee. It is incredibly difficult to prevent; although precautions should be and most often are taken particularly around the involuntary termination of employees.

 

Taking Another Path

 

The first step to avoid malicious destruction is to create policies which make your primary data more difficult to destroy. These include strict policies and procedures associated with not only involuntary but voluntary termination as well and on taking steps to secure your environment from external access.

 

From the perspective of data protection, theft is largely indistinguishable from human error in terms of the tools and techniques that must be used to protect your data – the only difference between the two is motive and motive isn’t really a factor in terms of this type of logical failure. Automation and retention again are the most important strategies for ensuring that you can survive this type of threat.

 

For more information on protecting your business from theft of data, contact NPV.com.

Unitrends

Have you Ever Wanted to Send Large Files by Email ?

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Google announced recently that it will be integrating Google Drive into Gmail, a move that will make it possible to send files up to a massive 10GB in size over your email.

 

A new button in the Gmail compose window will give users the ability to attach a file from their Google Drive account instead of attaching the file itself to the message body.

 

Once attached, Gmail will ensure that your recipient has permission to view the file in your Drive account otherwise, the system will prompt you to grant that permission –- and then sends the message.

 

The feature works not only for files you attach to the message, but also for links to items stored in Google Drive you might paste into a message.

 

Since you’re essentially sharing a link to the file in the cloud rather than the file itself, you can continue to update it, with those updates showing up for your recipient as well. You can collaborate on the shared document with the recipient directly in Google Drive, keeping a single copy rather than passing drafts back and forth, further filling your mailbox.

 

Microsoft currently offers a similar feature via Outlook and SkyDrive as well.

 

Each Google Drive user is granted 5GB of free storage from Google. In order to store and send files larger than 5GB users will be required to purchase additional Google Drive storage space to accommodate those files. Currently you can purchase 25GB of additional Google Drive storage for $2.49 per month, or 100GB for $4.99 per month.