June 2011
In this issue:

HTS Referral Program
The highest compliment you can give us is the referral of a new client. If you know of anyone who could benefit from any of the services we provide your company, please keep us in mind.

Click here to learn how you could earn a $100 American Express gift card in return for you referral!

As temperatures rise, it's important to remember, extreme heat can produce electrical brownouts. Having a backup plan for power loss can prevent short-term interruptions from becoming long-term pain. To avoid unexpected interruptions this summer, protect your technology with an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) and have charged laptops, with back-up batteries, on-hand for employees.

While extreme heat can wreak havoc on computers and other electrical devices, it also poses a serious threat to the well-being of your family and your employees. During the summer months, more people in this country die from extreme heat than from hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes, floods and earthquakes combined. Click here for some informative tips on how to stay safe and cool this summer.

Just for Laughs

 

Quote of the Month

"It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you."

- Dick Cheney

How Well Do You Know Your Network?
by Blake Britton, VP of Axxys Technologies

New client engagements are an exciting venture as they pose new challenges that our team is always ready to take on. Over the many years we have been serving the business community there continues to be a common theme among companies that view IT as nothing more than a necessary toolset for accomplishing various business tasks, a lack of technology records and maintenance.

Here are a few of the first items we look at when assessing the use of IT within any business: documentation, data/server room, and age of computers.

HTS Joplin Opens Free Internet Café
At the Salvation Army Hope Station

It’s been about four weeks since an F-5 tornado hit Joplin, Missouri. The Salvation Army has been a gathering place and a resource center for volunteers at their “Hope Station” located in the midst of one of the most devastated areas. Folks have come from all across the country to help and HTS wanted to find a way to show our support.

Larry Hedin, our VP of Sales and Marketing, came up with the idea of having a free internet café there. We partnered with Stouffer Communications to provide a wireless access point. HP supplied four notebooks that we are using as well. The café has been a big hit. We take the computers down in the morning and pick them up in the evening.

Every time we are there, someone thanks us for providing a way for them to check their email or Facebook. However, it’s all of us in Joplin that need to say thanks. Clean-up is a job we can’t accomplish without the help of others.

Click here to watch a short video of the Hope Station.

HP Networking and Mitel deliver a best-of-breed, end-to-end communications solution that has proved to be among the industry's best for voice quality, reliability, scalability and ease-of-use. Their strong and long-standing partnership ensures the seamless integration of their solutions and their approach to customer support.

Click here to watch a short video and learn how these solutions can work together to create a seamless communications platform.

Four Habits for Effective Workplace Communication
by Marlene Chism

Often it is our little habits that prohibit effective communication in the workplace. Whether it’s giving too much advice, offering too much leniency, or sharing too much excitement or passion, here are four habits to increase effective communication in the workplace.

• Hold your Tongue
• Hold your Advice
• Hold Good Boundaries
• Hold your Wrath

Read on for details on these 4 habits.

Five Steps Toward Disaster Preparedness
used with permission from Cisco Small Business Site

For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), the impacts of a disaster can result in loss of or lack of access to data, applications, and work facilities. Hurricane Katrina's devastation of the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005 impacted countless businesses, from retail stores and hotels to major corporations. Those with disaster recovery plans in place fared much better than those without such contingency plans.

More SMBs Beginning to Plan for Disasters
While the business impacts of disasters—such as the loss of data and communications infrastructure, leaving a business unable to function—are widely understood, SMB have been slower to develop disaster recovery plans as compared to larger organizations. But that appears to be changing. According to the Yankee Group's 2006 U.S. Small and Medium Business IT Survey, after security the other major concerns of SMBs are now backup and restore and then application and data availability. Globally, spending on data protection and recovery management among all businesses will surge from $58 million in 2006 to more than $200 million by 2011, according to research from IDC.

Yankee Group analyst Gary Chen found that among SMBs, "Most are on the edge, where a couple of bad events could shut down business. They need regular backup, either traditional scheduled file-based or continuous. And they need to have it off-site and tested, to ensure they can bring up critical applications and data if headquarters is wiped out."  People, processes, training, and planning are also part of effective disaster preparedness.

Here are five key steps to consider when implementing a program for your company.

www.heartlandtechnologies.com