The SSGI Team Is Awesome!

I know we have great team here at SSGI. But, you never know what to expect when a disaster occurs. As everyone knows, Connecticut had one of the worst October storms in its history on Saturday, October 29th. The storm dropped over 12" of snow and caused power outages for 87% of the state. By Saturday night most of the state and most of the SSGI team was in the dark. Kim was the only one to not lose power. Today, November 8th, 30000 homes in the state are still without power and unfortunately for some, it may still be a couple of days before it comes back on.

On Sunday I checked our office and found it too was without power. In fact, 97% of Torrington was without power. I checked in with our staff via very spotty cell service. Everyone was ok but looking forward to the power coming back on. At home I got our generator up and running and got some Internet access via my Verizon MiFi device. Most of my family moved into our house where we at least had heat, water and a DVD player.

On Monday power was still out in most areas. However, East Main street in Torrington was now live. That meant several gas stations and DUNKIN DONUTS were open. I started contacting Clients that I could get through to. It was not looking good. Still over 80% power outage in the state. By now Northeast Utilities was indicating the power would be out for an extended period in many areas of the state. Dunkin Donuts and the gas stations were total chaos. A trip to the office verified we still had no power.

On Tuesday power was getting restored to a few more areas. I worked with several Clients helping them get their servers back up and running. None of our staff had power back yet. In the afternoon power came on at home, but the office was still down. I contacted the guys and scheduled a meeting at our office on Wednesday morning so we could get to Clients that needed us. Around 5:00pm Gayle and I took a ride to the office. Power was still out. But within about a half hour it came on. I got our servers up and running and verified we had Internet as well. We were back in business!

On Wednesday morning everyone arrived at the office. I was the only one with power at home. But we started working on tickets immediately. As power was coming on our Clients needed us and we were there. We had a Client that was told they would not have power for at least a week. Because of the nature of their business, they needed to get on-line to process orders. We made plans to move their servers and some staff to our offices. The guys went home that evening to homes still in the dark.

Thursday came and still no power for any of the guys. We proceeded to move our desperate Client to our office. And the guys continued to handle tickets. Sometimes they had to improvise routes to the Clients because of trees down in roads. The state was still over 50% without power,

Over the weekend we saw lots of power come on although the guys still had none. Everyone of them showed up for work on Monday. These guys worked their butts off during this event. Other than stopping home to fill generators and check on their families, they were there for our Clients.

I'm proud of our team and what we accomplished during this disaster. As I write this, John is still without power. He is also on the road taking care of our Clients.

This has been a tough experience. There is a lot to be learned from it. One thing I learned is that we have an awesome team. I thank every one of them for their extraordinary efforts. Because of them, our Clients were able to get back up and running as soon as possible after power was restored to them. Let's hope we don't see anything like this again any time too soon. But if it does, rest assured this awesome team will be there to take care of our Clients.

Connecticut Power Outage Update

SSGI has had power and Internet fully restored as of 5:00pm on 11/1/11. Phones, email and the Client Portal are fully operational. 46% of Connecticut remains without power. Several cities and towns are still at 100% outage. Many side roads remain blocked by downed trees and/or wires. Some locations are expected to be without power for at least another 7 days. The Northeast Utilities Outage map can be found here.

Urgent Message

Due to the storm, SSGI has no power at this time. Currently, about 67% of Connecticut is without power, including 97% of Torrington. Because of the scope of power outages in Connecticut, it is expected that power outages will continue for up to 1 week or more. This outage is also affecting cell phones. However, you can call or text Ed's cell phone. We will also have an alternative support email account on-line by Monday morning. On Monday we will attempt to contact each of our Clients to access their status and update ours. We will update our status regularly here and on our Client Portal as well as our Twitter account @ssgisupport. UPDATE 11/1/11 Still no power at the office. 46% of Torrington and 54% of Connecticut without power. Support requests can be made at 800-897-7002. We are responding to calls . Please be patient. Phones are being routed through cellular service which is not in the best of shape either. Clients are beginning to get power back. Unfortunately there are still many cities and towns it CT with 100% outage

“After the storm” a roundtable discussion of disaster planning

While all of us have some type of disaster plan in place, even if it’s in our head, it’s a rare occasion that we can evaluate our plans with the fresh hindsight of an actual disaster.  Hurricane Irene has provided us when one of those rare opportunities.  Systems Support Group, Inc. will be presenting 2 roundtable discussions that will enable us all to be better prepared should another disaster occur.

These roundtables will bring together businesses that lived through power outages, internet outages, flood damage etc.  We will have an open discussion on how well existing disaster plans worked and what can be done better.  Bring your hurricane Irene stories and questions.

The first roundtable will be held at the Waterbury Courtyard Marriot on Thursday September 29th at 8:30am to 10:00am.  Reservations can be made by calling our office at 860-496-8684.

The second roundtable will be held at the Northwest Connecticut Chamber of Commerce in Torrington on Wednesday October 12th at 8:30am to 10:00am.  Limited reservations for non-chamber members are available by contacting our office at 860-496-8684.

Prepare for Irene

It looks like hurricane Irene is heading in our direction.  It’s current track has the eye passing roughly through the middle of the state as a category 1 hurricane on Sunday.  Of course, these things can change at any time. 

Hurricanes present several issues for IT equipment.  The most common are flooding and wind.  Flooding can be a problem for IT equipment that is on the floor especially in low lying areas.  Make sure any of your IT equipment that fits this scenario is lifted up off the ground or moved completely.  Water and electronic equipment do not play well together!  Remember, that hurricanes can cause water damage in other ways besides flooding.  Water can come in through roofs and windows as well.

Wind damage is the next problem.  In addition to causing physical damage to your building, wind can take trees down and spread debris around.  This in turn can cause power outages, which of course is a problem for your IT equipment.

Because this storm looks like it will hit over the weekend, it would be best to power off as much of your IT equipment as possible.  If you are on our 24x7 monitoring service, please notify us that you will be powering down.  If you can not power your equipment down, make sure it is in as safe an area as possible.  Power surges can cause the most damage to your IT equipment.  Any devices that are left on should, at the very least, be connected to a good UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply).  Realize that these will only be good for about 15 or 20 minutes.

It would be a good idea to make sure you have a current backup offsite.  For our Clients that use or remote backup service, we will be doing a basic test restore of a sample of your data by the end of the day Friday.

Make sure you have a good communications link with your employees and make sure your insurance information is close at hand.  Mostly importantly, safety first!  Make your preparations before hand.  If you find equipment under water don’t try to move it until the storm has passed, even if the power is out!  The power may come back on at any time and can prove deadly.

Hopefully, this storm will pass without any major issues.  However, it is best to be prudent and prepare as much as possible.  This would be a good time, where possible, to shut your IT equipment off.  Pull out that Disaster Plan and review it before the storm hits.  If you have questions about your specific environment, give a us a call.

This is a pretty good site for information about Hurricane Irene.   

One way to avoid disasters is to not create them

As IT support people, we are regularly responding to issues created by various types of disasters.  We have pretty much seen everything.  Fires, tornados, floods, roof collapses, loss of key employees have all been thrown at various Clients over the years.  We spend a good amount of time with our Clients planning for these types of disasters.  Disaster plans are developed and tested as much as possible.  Most of the disasters listed here are not under our control.  We can’t control the weather.  But we can plan for these things, so if they do happen to our business we can minimize their effects.

There is a whole set of other types of disasters that are controllable.  Not implementing proper security procedures, not replacing critical old equipment, using the server room as a storage area,  not installing UPSs on critical equipment, and other “controllable disasters” should never happen.  We often hear “we simply can’t have any down time”.  At the same time, the cleaning people use the server room to store their cleaning supplies, or the server room is 100 degrees, and the server in that server room is 10 going on 11 years old.  My question is if you can’t have any down time, why are you asking for it?

In fact, thinking over the last 28 years that we have been supporting Clients, my guess is that about 75% of the “disasters” that have been encountered were self inflicted. These self inflicted disasters cost time and money.  Usually a lot more than the preventative measures that could have been taken to avoid them.  So take a look at your IT environment.  What disasters are you inviting in?

Ray Promoted To Service Manager

As everyone already knows, Ray has been doing an excellent job for us since he came onboard a few years back.  His attention to our Client’s needs has made us a better company.  It’s as simple as that.  He has helped us organize our growing helpdesk and has kicked all our butts regarding documentation.  He has proven himself in working with our Clients and with our staff. 

As my plate has been overflowing, it has come time for me to concentrate on our business processes and growth.  With that in mind, I have promoted Ray to Service Manager.  He is now responsible for all aspects of our providing the best support we can to our Clients.  In actuality Ray has already been doing this for a while now.  We are just making it official.  One of his first tasks has been to get our service scheduling process more formalized.  As many of you already have noticed, we have been much more proactive at communicating with you regarding the status and scheduling of your service tickets.  The response for the few changes he has made so far has been great.  Look for more!

As a reminder, the best ways to request support are:

• Phone – Call our 800 number – Select 1 for support
• Email – Send an email to support@ – A ticket is created and you are notified
• Client Portal – Sign into our Client Portal – Create tickets, check on ticket status, check your inventory, licenses, invoices, etc
• Fax – Yes, we still get support request though fax

Please do not send new support requests to any of us individually via email or voicemail.  Use the support accounts as they are handled immediately whereas an individual email or voicemail will have to wait until the individual gets a chance to receive it.  With illness, vacations, training, meetings, etc., that can take longer than we would like.  As much as possible keep all correspondence regarding a ticket attached to the ticket.  That simply means reply to the ticket emails that come from the system or add “ticket#XXXXXX/” (XXXXXX=the actual ticket number) to the Subject line of any email to attach that email to the ticket.  (Do not include the quotes)

We are constantly striving to provide the best support possible for you, our Clients.  As Service Manager, Ray will be a great force in meeting that goal.

And me?  Well, I have a bunch of things up my sleeve that I will now get time to get started or completed.  You will hear about several of them very soon.

Great Night at The Rock Cats

 

Tuesday, June 7th was Technology Night at New Britain Stadium where the New Britain Rock Cats play.  The Rock Cats are the farm team for the Minnesota Twins.  They defeated the Akron Aeros, the Cleveland Indians farm team.

As a sponsor of the evening, we had several Clients and staff in attendance.  Although the near 90 degree weather was a little tough, everyone had a fun evening.

 

It was great seeing everyone and we look forward to sponsoring again next year.

Nothing like a fire to dust of your disaster plan

As everyone is probably aware, I was awakened last Saturday morning at 3am by our alarm monitoring company telling me our fire alarm at the office had gone off. On my way to the office I imagined everything from a false alarm to the smoldering ashes of a total loss. Not a good feeling. I arrived to find 4 fire trucks and a bunch of firefighters running around our office building. The bad feeling got worse. After speaking to one of the firemen, I found out that the office directly behind ours was where the fire occurred. The fire was out but the office was destroyed.

Due to our newly installed alarm system (installed in December) and the great response from the Torrington Fire Department, our office was spared any fire damage although we are still fighting the smoke smell.

Even though we were spared any real damage, this episode caused me to kick in various pieces of our disaster plan. The process highlighted several issues that I thought I would share.

First, it's the little things that will get you. Of course we have various business insurances. But the contact info is (or was) in the office. In this case, once I was able to get into the office I could locate the info. I have now created a Microsoft OneNote notebook and store a synced copy of it in the "Cloud" on a SkyDrive account. This notebook is our complete disaster plan. Everything from contact info to specific procedures is in this notebook. Of course it is a constant work in process, but by having it synced to the "Cloud", I have access to it from any computer that has Internet access. This includes my home computer, my various tablets (don't ask - of course I need 3 tablets) and even my cell phone. The fact that the notebook is synced on several of these devices means I have access to the most recent version of the plan even if I don't have Internet access.

Next, disasters come in many forms. Our office was spared in this case. However, I did not have access until the Fire Marshall said I could go in. If the fire was of suspecious origin, which might have required ongoing investigation, I might not have had access to our office for an extended period of time, a disaster in itself. By having a list of our critical functions I am able to determine which of those functions have to be put in disaster mode. For instance, our service ticketing software is hosted. So, other then letting everyone know that they need to access it from home, I would not have to worry about this critical function.

So our little "disaster" turned out to be just that, little. But, I am more confident about our ability to react to a more serious disaster from the lessons learned. What else is in our Disaster Plan Notebook? You'll have to keep your eyes here on our blog. I will post more information soon.

HIPAA/HiTech Compliance Seminar

SSGI will be presenting a HIPAA/HiTech Compliance Seminar at the Northwest Connecticut Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday, April 27th from 8:30am to 10:00am. The seminar will help healthcare providers understand the changes in the HIPAA rules that the HiTech Act has introduced.

During the seminar SSGI will announce a partnership with eGestalt to provide web based HIPAA compliance assessements. These assessments will help healthcare providers determine their current compliance status and help them become and stay compliant.

For more information conact the Chamber of Commerce office at 860-496-8684 or SSGI at 800-897-7002.

Office 2010 Ribbon Bar to Menu Pull Down Help

We have been converting many of our Clients to Microsoft Office 2010 from various older versions of Office.  Overall, everything is going well.  However, for some Clients the Ribbon Bar, introduced in Office 2007, is causing some problems.  Even though the design of the Ribbon Bar is supposed to make finding all the the various Office functions easier, it can actually be more difficult for those that have already created a mental path to finding those functions in the old menu pull downs.  This appears to be a common problem.  To address the issue, Microsoft has created several tools to help users make the change.  You can find them here.

I have found that the Ribbon Bar is actually easier to use, but I do find that sometimes I just can’t find something that I used to be able to locate pretty quickly.  By using these tools and a little replication I can get my brain to accept the change.

Medi-Span Update Distribution Changes

Wolters Kluwer, the company that owns Medi-Span, is making changes to the way it distributes the quarterly drug database updates.  After June 30th 2011 they will no longer ship the updates via CD.  Instead, they will publish the updates to a website to be downloaded.  This means there will be one more CD update covering 2Q11.  After that customers will need to download the updates from the website.

This affects our Allscripts Clients.  We have partnered with Wolters Kluwer to take care of the whole process for our Clients.  We will create the necessary website account and set up the process.  For those Clients that we manage the Medi-Span updates, we will download and install them when they are released.  We will be notified by Wolters Kluwer when updates are released.  At that point we will download the updates and schedule an after hours installation.

In order for Allscripts Clients to be able to utilize the downloadable updates Allscripts must be at version 7.0.1.36 or higher. Clients that wish to have us take care of the registration process can simply contact our office.

Internet Explorer 9 Released

The latest version of Internet Explorer was released on 3/14/11.  Version 9 is more secure, faster and sports an updated user interface.  On the technical side, it supports HTML5 very well.  The new user interface is much slimmer than previous versions allowing for more viewing area.  It takes advantage of hardware acceleration which allows for a very fast browsing experience.  Expect some pretty neat stuff when web developers start taking advantage of IE9’s display capabilities.  The address and search bar are now combined in the One Box.  It takes a little getting used to, but quickly feels like the right way to work. 

IE9 is tightly integrated with Windows 7.  It also runs in Windows Vista but not Windows XP.  Websites can be pinned to the taskbar and/or start menu in Windows 7.  IE9 also allows users to protect themselves from marketing tracking that occurs on many if not most websites.  You can manually block tracking on specific websites or utilize predefined lists that are provided by several Microsoft partners. 

IE9 is much more standards compliant than previous versions of IE.  While not perfect, it really does work much better on more sites than in the past.  It’s adherence to HTML5 specs will insure that this is true moving forward as well.

I have been using IE9 for about 8 months.  Other than the typical “beta issues” that comes with running beta software, it has been pretty good.  By the time the Release Candidate was available, IE9 was pretty solid.   Now that the final product has been released, it’s certainly worthy of replacing your existing browser.  As with all new software, we do suggest taking some time to test IE9 in your specific environment to insure that your critical websites work properly before you roll it out to your devices.  It’s a solid product.  It will make browsing the internet safer, faster and much more enjoyable.

What is YOUR Time Worth?

It seems like we go through phases when Clients or prospects begin asking whether they can do some of their own network support.  Of course this really starts coming up more often when the economy is in a poor condition.  We always try to get our Clients to take on some of the basic day to day support tasks.  For instance, why pay us to replace a mouse or keyboard.  In some cases, if the Client has a little more technical expertise we will help them take on higher level tasks.  However, when it comes to items they may affect the security or reliability of their network, we draw the line.

Most often these requests are based on perceived costs.  “If I do the task myself I don’t have to pay you and therefore I save money.”  In the case of lower level tasks that may be true.  However, in higher level tasks it may not only be untrue but can also be disastrous.

First, let’s think about pure cost.  Over the years I have had doctors, lawyers, business owners and other high level people attempt to do their own network support.  Let’s say that an IT Pro charges $100.00 per hour.  A problem occurs on the network.  The doctor, lawyer, business owner does his/her own troubleshooting and tries to resolve the issue his or herself.  Let’s even say they get things going.  Perhaps it took several hours, maybe a day, maybe more.  So we saved the cost of the IT person, right?  Probably not.  Consider this.  How much is the value of that doctor’s, lawyer’s, etc time?  In most cases, the value of that persons time far exceeds the $100.00 that the IT Pro would have charged.  Beyond that, how much faster would the IT Pro have solved the problem?  If we just estimate half the time, how much is that in downtime cost to the organization?  Do you know how much it costs your organization for every hour of downtime?

Another perhaps even more serious consideration is even if the network is up and running again, what might you have missed?  Perhaps the hard drive is failing and simply turning the server off and on cleared the immediate problem.  Everyone goes back to work and after a few minutes, hours, days, or weeks it goes down again.  This time this system will not come up and after more time is spent trying to fix the problem you call in an IT Pro.  What he or she finds is that not only is the hard drive now completely dead, the backup has not been running since the original issue.  What is the cost of all that lost work?

While it is true that Clients have the capability to fix simple IT related problems, in most cases the perceived cost savings by trying to handle more involved IT issues is simply not there.  And in some cases the results can be disastrous.