Toshiba Phone Systems and More

How much time do you spend going through Spam daily?

Today’s businesses need robust yet simple e-mail threat protection that takes minutes, not hours, per week to manage. Available as a hardened appliance or as Windows software, SonicWALL Email Security provides powerful protection in one simple solution that dramatically reduces the time and expense involved in e-mail security.

SonicWALL Email Security offers the highest possible level of network protection from all inbound and outbound e-mail threats by leveraging a global end-to-end attack monitoring network. Protections include:

· Anti-spam

· Anti-phishing

· Anti-virus & Time-Zero technology

· Policy management

· Connection management

· Zombie detection

· Compliance & content filtering – regulatory & corporate

We implemented this technology at Pilothouse because of the large amount of “spam” that was coming into everyone’s email inbox. It was taking so much time to go through it daily- once we implemented this it immediately stopped. Every day each user gets an easy to read report of all the spam mail that was captured, or you can log into a real-time log of captured spam and have the ability to view any email and “unjunk it” so you don’t miss those important emails that we are waiting for that may be perceived as spam.

Within this product there are many reports that show where this spam is coming from, who’s the top receiver and sender of spam- monitoring outbound spam is also very important, it could indicate someone has hacked into your system and is using your email server as an outbound spam server- you would never know. You will be amazed at the number of junk emails that come to your organization on an hourly basis. You also can see the ROI on a daily basis for your employees not having to deal with these emails.

Here is a staggering stat from our system of only 10 email users from last month: 3371 good emails and 27433 were Junk, (SPAM, Virus or Phishing)

If you are tired of wasting time and expense everyday going through your emails looking for “real” emails, call us for more information on the SonicWALL email security solution we sell. 866-887-5792

What makes a phone system great? Is it the features that is has? Is it the ease of use, maybe how reliable it is! I was reading a blog post today by ramonray:  http://tinyurl.com/bzvlgr and it got me thinking.

Features are important but a lot of times the ones that could help you the most don’t get used! Ease of use is big, if you can’t use the phone system to its capacity then what good are all the features? If the phone system is not reliable like with poor VoIP quality then your customers are not going to want to talk to you.

So what makes a phone system great? How about the service company that installed it? All the things mentioned are important and the best way to get all of these is to do business with a GREAT service company! A great service company will make sure that you know how to use all the features, that the system is installed properly to ensure it is always running right! Great service companies make good phone systems GREAT!

Ask your self three things about your service company, 1. are their Techs certified on the products? 2. do they invest in continuing education from the manufacture? 3. Do they know the product well?

So what do you think? Is it the box or the people behind it? What makes a phone system great?

We have been working on new ways to get ourselves “found” on the web. More and more people are doing research, looking for products and services via the web. It’s not enough anymore to just have a website, you have to have a blog.  Google is still the master of the search engine, while Yahoo and Live Search are hanging in there- you need to be found by Google- do you pay someone to manage this ever-changing “mystery” of SEO. We tried that once, but it didn’t work, we spent a lot of money and got nothing. You need to be careful who you work with, there are a lot of people that profess to be SEO experts but there are scam artists out there. Video looks to be the next big thing – google likes video. I won’t do it but my partner has started to do some of his blogs in video-

Fresh content, social marketing sites, like facebook  and twitter will also help make connections, links and backlinks…all foreign to me but I have to say I’m learing a lot. It does take time to build and keep it going.

Here’s a great article on this topic from someone I follow in Twitter http://tinyurl.com/cnpnbq
If you’d like to find me: Facebook at http://tinyurl.com/5pllqb 

With the economy tightening up, small business owners have the luxury of being able to be flexible in the marketing efforts.  Larger companies can’t always be as flexible and respond as quickly to changes that need to be made. We were talking with our business coach yesterday about  this. When the environment you have been operating changes you can’t continue to do the same things and expect to achieve the same results. What’s the definition of insanity? “Do the same things over and over again expecting a different result.”  The numbers game just got a lot bigger. Is it harder to find new business? Absolutely but not impossible -you just have to be creative, respond quickly and change your thinking. I have been spending the last several days learning about social networking, trying to figure out a way to make this work. Working on SEO, partnering with other small businesses who we can forge a mutually beneficial relationship with. That means  re thinking everything we are doing on a daily basis. We are refusing to participate in this recession. One other thing you need to do is to stay POSITIVE. All the doom and gloom portrayed by the media is only adding to the worsening economy. We have new leadership but we all need to do OUR part. The  responsibility for your success lays within you. Think outside the box, be creative and innovative in your marketing efforts, test and measure, and move forward. I saw a good blog posting -  on growing your service business and it got me thinking, we are all in this together and can help each other out to more prosperous times. What are you doing differently to generate new business or hold on to your existing business?