I’d like to tell you about a Community IT client I have worked with for almost as long as I have worked at Community IT. Once or twice a week, for almost ten years, I have made four hour site visits to this downtown Silver Spring office to: – check-in with end users – solve computer problems – discuss IT budget and planning with the Executive Director – monitor server free disk space – monitor the network’s antivirus management console – and much, much more
In my previous blog post I briefly discussed some of the features available in Office 365. In this post I want to discuss the current Office 365 license plans available. A lot is changing at Microsoft (see our previous blog posts) so this is all subject to change.
Green’s the theme this week, as we’re participating once again in Bike to Work Day today, and all week in the Big Green Commute. The latter is a DC-area event in which organizations compete to encourage each other to take greener commuting methods all week. We’ll be using this blog to share some photos of our staff participating in the events this week.
Promotion Announcement and other big days at Community IT! Work anniversaries, awards, and other notable announcements!
IT Alignment has been a topic of great passion for me and other nonprofit techies for over a decade, yet the concept still seems new to some. We have presented the session in numerous ways at previous Nonprofit Technology conferences, but the topic still seems elusive. IT alignment is the alignment of technology to mission. The concept is easy, but making it happen is complex. Anyone can talk about aligning tech to mission, so why is it hard to find great example of success?
Many organizations are growing increasingly frustrated and concerned with the endless parade of malware, viruses and security hacks. While it is tempting to think that a better anti-virus package is waiting just around the corner, recent reports from Slate and Symantec suggest that traditional AV protection may be growing less helpful by the month.
When we think of COOs, many of us probably first think of Sheryl Sandberg, one of the most well-known in the United States. Here at Community IT we are very proud of our own COO, Johan Hammerstrom, who recently received an Executive Management Award from SmartCEO for his work here at Community IT.
Since before “the cloud” became a popular buzz word, we have been exploring cloud technologies. Do they deliver on the promises of better services at better costs? We have found that the answer has increasingly become ‘yes’ for many of our clients. One technology that we’ve seen implemented a lot recently, Microsoft Office 365. Many of our clients, looking at the cost of purchasing a new Microsoft Exchange Email Server, instead opt to move their email to Office 365. And why not? Office 365 is free for qualifying nonprofits. It makes a great replacement for an in-house Exchange server.
Microsoft has released a security advisory for a recently discovered zero day vulnerability that affects Microsoft Internet Explorer versions 6 – 11. While the vulnerability can be blocked, those steps would render Internet Explorer unusable for many websites including some of the IE-only websites such as secure banking and ActiveX-driven applications.
For this vulnerability we’re following the guidance of US CERT that in lieu of a patch or viable mitigating adjustment to IE, we recommend using another browser such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.
It’s Monday morning and one of your user walks into your office in panic. Her laptop screen is dead and your support team won’t fix it. Another user comes in with a dead smartphone and the response is the same. Finally the CFO calls from home and her printer is kaput and yet no one from the IT team will help. Time to fire your IT firm? Not quite. The devices in this scenario are owned by the users themselves. Because these devices were not issued by your company and you have nothing in your BYOD policy about this, your support team is taking a very conservative approach. In many service industries there is a phrase called “last hands.”