This blog will specifically be aimed toward the AMT Online Vault, and next week we’ll begin an introduction of our premier product, Always-On.  The Online Vault is a secure, online backup program from any pc. Generally this will be ideal for the 1-2 user networks, 2-3 pc’s to backup.  A step up: The Always-On Backup includes a backup server (provided by All Mountain Technologies) and updates a backup image (for up to 3 servers for the base model) every 15 minutes. Every night the image updates are backed up securely online to assure that all data is offsite. Always-On Backup is ideal for 5-50 user networks, and is designed for a server-based installation and backup. The BDR Backup Server’s image backups can also be mounted in 20-30 minutes to “take-over” if there is some catastrophic failure with the server, for complete redundency until the original server is repaired and back online.

The AMT Online Vault is simply an online backup tool which will back up changed files each night. It is a secure, easy to setup, and easy to manage backup services, and you can rest assured that your data is safe and securely offsite and backed up. There are no more USB drives, and no more keychain drives that fail or fill up. Each night, all new data since the last backup is uploaded to the Secure AMT Online Vault. You are emailed logs and updates of the backup status. Your data is truly safe, secure and you can quit worrying about it.

This is the biggest part. Your peace of mind. No more failed backups. No more worry.

CA for All Mountain Technologies, Llc.

Secure your Peace of Mind with Always-On.

AMT’s Relexion Spam filter is the best available Spam filter you can find. It is very fast, works very well, and uses new technologies like Radar and grey listing.

I’m going to take a minute and describe the difference between a spam filter service and a spam filter program running on your pc. A program on your pc can be effective, but there are two flaws.

It slows down your computer as any running program will, and any spam or virus is not caught until AFTER it’s arrived at your computer. Because a program is on your computer, all the spam get’s to your inbox anyway, then the program has to run from there to decide if the mail is spam or not, so your mail function in general is greatly diminished.

A spam filter is, in general, a third-party site with servers that filter out spam and viruses. We configure all of your mail to go to this new filter site. After viruses and Spam are filtered out, the good mail (and ONLY the good mail) is then sent on to your inbox. You can login to the service so see your held mail, or you can review weekly or daily reports to your email and white-list/release from there. AMT’s Relexion Spam Filter services also inserts a “Control Panel” at the bottom of every email. Between this and the daily reports, you can preform almost every necessary function without daily visits to your Quarantine sight…

So Potential Spam and viruses never hit your computer, your inbox, your office. And using the outbound services as well will secure your mail like no other service, all for less than $3.00 per mailbox per month. Let us know if you’re interested. AMT’s Relexion Spam Filtering service is the fastest most effective spam filter service available.

Intuitive. Effective. Stop the in-SPAM-ity.

CA for All Mountain Technologies.

Secure your Peace of Mind with Always On Monitoring and updating.

Microsoft Exchange is a powerful tool. For those of you who are not familiar with it, it offers all kinds of advantages over pop mail. It functions as a web based Mailbox that synchronizes with Outlook or Entourage on the mac.

· No backup of email data is necessary. By nature of the product, your email is saved both offsite and on your pc. The file synchronizes every time you are back online.

· All mail folders and information on all computers and phones/devices are perfectly synchronized.

· Calendar and Outlook information sharing with multiple view/edit rights available. This means an office manager can update multiple calendars which in turn, sync to the user’s IPhone or Blackberry

· Common Public Folders for shared calendars, contacts, tasks and notes.

· SpamLab Spam Filtering included with each Hosted Exchange account.

· Free Aliases

· Ease of management for both the end-users, and the onsite client-administrator

A hosted exchange account is generally between $14 and $20 per month depending if you’ve got additional fee services such as BES for the blackberry. Before a couple of years ago, you HAD to purchase an exchange server, Hardware and Software licenses. Some people still prefer to have their mail server onsite, and paying for 20 or more accounts monthly can get costly. But a server has maintenance and hidden costs as well. Not only is a server expensive to purchase and maintain, but you’ll need a second one if you want a Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES). How many people are you providing mailboxes for?

Hosted Servers are available as well, talk about that later. For now you simply need to ask yourself the following two questions. Is your Exchange Server Aging and have you priced out Exchange Server 2007 licensing, Server Hardware and Warranties?

Do you have 30 or less people with mailboxes in your office?

If the answer is yes to either of those, you should investigate AMT Hosted Exchange over Server replacement.

Happy Holidays all.

CA for All Mountain Technologies, Llc.

Solutions that Work for YOU!

That indeed is the question?

The next question is: What do you need to host?

Which servers and services do you wish to “webify”?

Hosted Exchange is $15/month. Sharepont hosting is $20

So calculate how many users you’ve got, then calculate how much your exchange server will be to replace.

If you have bulk data that needs to be stored onsite (at least for the next 2 or 3 years until internet lines are as reliable as phone lines), what is your answer?

We’ve had incredible results with AMT Always ON BDR Backup servers on site, as well as an online backup service such as the AMT Online Vault backing up a local storage server or SAN drive.

As long as you’re online and you’re data’s backed up, we’re happy.

There are several advantages to “webifying” your business, and All Mountain Technologies can help you along this path. Almost every piece of your business can be put on the web for a monthly fee.

Whatever your needs, we’ll be diving into all the possibilities and advantages of web services in the next series of blogs.

Good day, all!

Chris Alexander for…

All Mountain Technologies

Secure your peace of mind.

Email is dynamic. Your mailbox changes every second of every day. In many ways email flows like a river. It is impossible to stop the flow, even for a little bit.

I came back from 5 days without my phone or computer to 400 new emails. (And that doesn’t include Spam, either). Because email is dynamic, it must be managed and archived.

Most mailboxes have a maximum size, and if you’re not using an Exchange Server or other mail server, you probably have most of your mail locally, in a file on the c drive of your computer. We can discuss mailbox files and file locations for the Mac in a subsequent blog, but for now we’ll discuss Microsoft Outlook.

Outlook keeps all of it’s data (mail, calendar, tasks note and any subfolders) in a .pst file or personal folder file. Unless specified otherwise specified and configured, mail is stored under your profile folder under documents and settings.

Here is an exerpt from Microsoft:

“If you use a POP3 e-mail account, which is one of the more common types of personal e-mail accounts, your e-mail messages are downloaded from your POP3 e-mail server at your Internet service provider (ISP) to your computer and delivered to and stored locally in a Personal Folders file (.pst) named Outlook.pst (the default data file name). Outlook.pst is stored in the <drive>:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook”

Here is an article about how to move your Outlook.pst file to another location, perhaps a folder in your Documents folder which is already included in your backup.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA011124801033.aspx

In Outlook Express, mail is located in a hidden folder named Identities under the Application Data folder in under Documents and settings. Here is a Microsoft article regarding backing up and restoring your Outlook Express data.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/270670

Outlook has an archive fuction that will automatically move mail that is older than a specific date to an archive folder. While this is handy, it can also lead to missing emails. For example, I was not diligent in manually archiving my email and turning off the auto archive. What happened was that some old mails were archived to different files on different computers, making it almost to find a specific email that was archived at my house verus on my work computer.

The easiest way to arhive is to copy the file to another location or backup hard drive, then clearing out all of your old mails, leaving perhaps the last month or quarter for reference. Another method is to use the Import/Export tool in Outlook, which will effectively do the same thing, but with a few more steps. I would highly recommend moving your Outlook.pst file to your Documents folder for ease of backup.

Your archive files can be named by the date you archived them, and a copy of them can be stored in a folder on your desktop or in your documents folder for quick reference.

In the next blog, we’ll discuss the benefits of Hosted Exchange, and spotlight the

AMT Hosted Exchange Service in our new Service Spotlight edition blog.

AMT Spam Filter service

Happy Computing,

Chris Alexander

All Mountain Technologies  has more professional certifications and professional channel partners than any of our competitors in our market here in Eagle County, Colorado (and surroundings areas).  We have invested resources in our channel partners such as Microsoft, Dell, and Cisco so let’s briefly examine the benefits this effort confers on us for our customers vs. less qualified and less well staffed competitive alternatives. 

First, AMT is professionally certified with all Microsoft offerings that are likely the IT cornerstones in your business (MCSE, MCP, etc.).  Second, AMT has a staff large enough to cover our clients 24/7/365 which doesn’t take vacations – someone will always be available to help.  Our size and available resources allow us the freedom to invest in utilities to resolve and even proactively prevent IT issues that are cost-prohibitive to smaller companies.  Third, we constantly work with our channel partners to educate and certify our technicians as new products are introduced in order to get our certifications current and so AMT can stay up to date.

All Mountain Technologies believes it is important to invest in this training and professionally certify our staff.  Let’s look at one example: Cisco – one of the leading providers of routing, networking, and IP telephone equipment. All Mountain Technologies is a Cisco Certified Premier partner.  Our staff takes classes and receives training with regard to the exact software and hardware that we offer.  Using our example, our certifications allow us to offer partner only Cisco resources (such as superior levels of Cisco support inaccessible to non-partners). 

We believe that our customers are best served by technicians that are prepared, ready, and qualified to deal with your IT issues and that is what we try and provide.  We have also partnered with IT industry leaders in these areas for that same reason.  Those industry leading vendors recognize our commitment and will often give AMT significant ‘partner discounts’ that we can in turn pass on to our current customers as well – they don’t want to see their expensive equipment being used improperly out there either!

We have seen instances of misdiagnosed issues or technicians who are unfamiliar with rapidly evolving and ever more complex IT equipment causing serious downtime and weeks of problems at some companies.  In fact by coming in, diagnosing, and promptly resolving issues just like this we gained several of our current and more loyal clients!

So, do we charge more the guys working out of garages for our consulting services?  Maybe… but if you had a need for a medical procedure — say ACL knee surgery — wouldn’t you expect to pay more to have a certified physician perform the procedure in an appropriate environment instead of a witch doctor?  The answer is probably "yes" because then you would also expect standardized methodology and someone who has more than his or her word to prove competence in that field!  You don’t want to find out after the fact you’ve bought the wrong equipment or your technician doesn’t have the IT knowledge that he should either.

No offense to witch doctors but that’s how we approach it with IT.

If keeping your business up and running really matters to you then professional certifications should matter too and you should give us a call at 970-748-8880 to see if we can help you with your IT needs.  We can also be found on the web at http://www.allmtntech.com.

…or you can keep relying on the witch doctor and hoping!  Good luck