Inland Pacific Consulting
VisitUsAt.com (dba Inland Pacific Consulting) is a development and hosting company serving the on-line demands of today's business. You will find us large enough to offer and support the latest technology, yet small enough for you to talk to.
We are here to answer the questions that will enable you to establish your business on the Internet and to collaborate with employees and clients in the easiest and most cost effective manner. If you are considering implementing the latest Microsoft collaboration tools; or simply looking for a new, more reliable hosting solution and collaboration service provider, VisitUsAt.com can help.
If you have any questions regarding collaboration services, web hosting, design or domain name services, please call 1-800-593-0234 toll free.
Monthly Archives: April 2008
The Importance of Centralized IT Management
I have seen too many small and even more medium sized organizations that do not have a centralized IT infrastructure and even worse have no written IT policy or operations manual. Consequently there is no coordination between departments and no continuity necessary to accommodate employee turnover. I have seen this lead to some truly undesirable consequences.
There was an organization I worked for that had an ISP that provided their Internet connection and assigned IP addresses. They had an IT department that is in charge of the internal network and manage the Exchange server for company email, file servers and provided support for users. They outsourced their web site hosting to another company. Each department managed their area of the web site via MS FrontPage to conserve cost. Each department that worked on the site would sort of 'assume' they were responsible for the entire site which lead to a whole myriad of problems.
These are some of the consequences that were directly related to this lack of organization and centralization in just one company:
1. When the organization originally decided to have their first site developed, a committee was formed and several different contractors were interviewed and a choice was made as to who to go with. Specifications were provided for the site–one of the most important was that the organization have the ability to manage the various areas of the site internally to save on the ongoing cost of outsourcing.
After a few years, a new employee was hired into one of the departments that quasi managed the entire site. This individual had a friend with a web design company and decided to have this friend re-do the site. The result was a fantastic looking site that nobody but a professional web designer could update without causing the look of the pages to degrade. Consequently, rather than saving money by being able to make updates in-house, they had to now outsource this work.
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New CIRA WHOIS Policy
CIRA has informed us that they will be sending an informational email about the changes to the Administrative contact for all .ca domain names on May 6th, 2008. You can read more about the specifics of the new CIRA WHOIS Policy at CIRA's web site – http://www.cira.ca/en/Whois/whois_intro.html
Points of note:
- Effective June 10th, 2008, the .ca public WHOIS will no longer provide personal information for individual domain name registrants.
- Registrant information for domains registered to corporations will still be provided.
This will be a welcome change and will help to prevent unscrupulous companies from using whois information to perpetrate domain hijacking and other scams on domain owners.
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Email Server Upgrades
We are excited to announce that we will be upgrading our email server to the new release of SmarterMail 5.1, currently in beta testing, as soon as the manufacturer releases it to market.
SmarterMail 5.x builds upon a solid reputation of stability, performance, and value by adding hundreds of new features and enhancements—solidifying its position as the cost-effective alternative to Microsoft Exchange™ for businesses.
Synchronization of calendar, contacts, and tasks is available from Outlook™, Windows Mobile devices, PocketPCs, and Smartphones (e.g. Motorola Q™, Palm Treo™, Samsung BlackJack™). All users can access the complete set of email and collaboration tools from an industry-leading Web Interface that supports all major internet browsers.
Security features have been enhanced with 99% antispam protection along with standard antivirus, intrusion detection, and attack prevention. SmarterMail 5.x has integrated the Yahoo! DomainKeys authentication standard and is compliant with regulatory requirements for email archiving (Sarbanes-Oxley)1 in SmarterMail 5.x.
We are eagerly awaiting the upcoming release of version 5.1 and all of the new features it will afford our clients.
Here are a list of some of the features I especially am looking forward to:
- Attachments can be uploaded in the background while composing messages.
- Automatic saving of draft messages while composing.
- Calendar appointments and tasks can now notify users via a new Reminders System.
- Composing and reading emails can now be performed in a popup window or in the main window.
- DomainKeys are now supported for inbound verification and outbound signing.
- Searching for Email Messages has been enhanced.
- Request or Send delivery receipts for email in the web interface.
- Set and indicate message importance within the web interface.
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Is it time to put your graphics on a diet?
One of the most frequent mistakes made by novice web designers is putting huge images on their web pages—images that are too large and take too long to download. Images need to be optimized for quick loading and proper style proportions before putting them on web pages. There is a delicate balance that needs to be achieved between file size and picture quality as the majority of load time for a web page comes from the images.
There are three areas where bytes can be shaved off your images: bit depth (the number of colors), resolution (the density or number of pixels per inch the image contains), and the dimension (the actual length and width of the image).
The actual dimensions, or size, of your image is the easiest to achieve, but avoid just setting the dimensions for the image in your web authoring program. You need to resize your image to the proper dimensions before inserting it in your web page; otherwise your image will appear smaller, but in fact the entire large image is still being downloaded. The dimensions are being restricted, but the size of the image being downloaded has not changed.
The resolution and bit depth are a bit trickier, but fortunately there are various tools to aid you in accomplishing this. One of the best is Adobe Photo Shop, though this solution is pricy and has a relatively steep learning curve; it is best left to professional web developers and graphic artists.
One of the best and easiest to use image optimizer programs for novice web masters is available free from Bluefive Software and can be downloaded here. Try it out; I’m sure you’ll like it. You can even use it to optimize your images before you send them in your emails—your friends will thank you.
Posted in General, Technical
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Google, Microsoft and Yahoo agree on unified SiteMaps!
It's been more than a year now since the three top contenders in the Search industry have agreed on a method for listing sites in their respective search engines; and other search engines have been invited to use the same method.
What are sitemaps?
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.
Is your site 'search engine friendly'?
If you haven't added the new XML SiteMap to your web site your ranking in search engines may suffer or many important pages you would like to have indexed may simply be passed by because webbots and crawlers can't find them. There are other things that you can do to make sure your site is search engine friendly such as using heading tags that match content, etc.
For more information on site maps or tips on improving your site rankings shoot us an email.
Posted in General, Technical
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Is your website in compliance?
Blind Americans demand Web access; Target fights back.
Retailer Target is being sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act because their website is not accessable to the blind. You can read the full article here and it should be an eye-opener.
In light of this lawsuit many other online retailers are quietly upgrading their sites to be compliant with the Act and avoid problems themselves.
Is your website in compliance? If you would like to know, contact Inland Pacific Consulting and we can give you an assement of your site and let you know what you need to do in order to prevent any potential problems with non-compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act and make sure your site is accessible to all people that want to view it.
Posted in Alert, General
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Windows VISTA Warning!
The last few weeks have found me in Vista hell with the fires being extinguished just yesterday…what a relief.
Vista has a new security 'feature' called User Account Control (UAC), which is designed to prevent novice computer users from accidentally doing anything on their computer that might compromise security. UAC causes several pop-up warnings to appear when a user opens certain programs which advise the user that a potential security risk could be incurred if they continue with this action and requires them to either click "I know what I'm doing–Allow" or "Oops–I'm not sure I should be doing this–Deny". (You might have seen these annoying pop-ups featured in a recent TV ad for Apple computers.)
You have the ability to turn this 'feature' off, if you feel you know what you are doing, which fortunately is a good thing, because it seems Vista thinks almost everything you do on your computer is a potential security threat, and it is REALLY aggravating to continually get these pop-ups.
Here is where the problem arises. I use QuickBooks for my accounting. QuickBooks has the ability to download automatically billed credit card charges from your bank–however this feature will not work if UAC is turned off. This is just one of the many compatibility issues between QuickBooks and Vista–even though they market their product as being totally Vista compatible.
So, normally during the week, I would keep UAC turned off to avoid the pop-ups and turn it on at the end of the week to download the payments that were received during the week; and immediately turn it off again after the payments downloaded. (Turning UAC on and off requires a reboot–just to make the whole process of turning it on and off even more annoying.)
Posted in Alert
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