How Apptix Online Backup Saved the Day

"The Blue Screen of Death. It happens to nearly all of us at some point, despite our best efforts to make our computers feel loved with regular updates and gentle sweet talk.

Last week, my hard drive decided to go to that great Best Buy in the Sky. I panicked, of course – blinding paranoia took over as I realized all my hard work was gone … gone forever into the abyss, never to be seen again. I just knew I’d spend forever rebuilding and redoing until everything was finally back up to snuff.

Lucky for me, our IT Guy heard my screams and swears and came running over to my desk in full superhero mode. Placing his hands on his hips and jutting his chin high into the air, he said, “How can I help you, milady?”

I explained that my laptop had died a sudden and tragic death, and right in the middle of that groundbreaking report I was writing that I hadn’t managed to save in awhile. (Because, isn’t that ALWAYS when these things happen? When you’re doing something truly amazing and too busy for a quick Control-S?)

“Don’t fret,” he said. “You’ve got Apptix Online Backup!”

Once the chorus of angels in my head quieted down, I realized I was one lucky lady. Sure enough, my handy dandy backup runs like clockwork, and all my stuff, including that Super Mega Important Groundbreaking Document, was safe and sound out there in the cloud, just waiting to come back home.

The IT Guy got to rebuilding my machine in no time, and I went about answering emails and lowering my blood pressure while the backup service repopulated my PC. I hardly knew the restoration was running in the background, except that my files kept magically reappearing.

Whew. Simple, safe, secure, and, most importantly, fast. Thanks, Apptix Online Backup. You really did save the day.

I’m glad Online Backup helped me avert disaster. Any horror stories of your own to share? Let us know in the comments. Interested in more information about our Online Backup service, or any of our other security solutions? Check out the Apptix Online Backup site, or give us a call.

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The Fast-growing Adoption of Unified Communications

One of the hottest emerging technology solutions in the past few years has been Unified Communications (UC). It started as a simple concept – combining your voicemail and email service into one inbox – but has grown into a game-changing technology that can reshape the way your organization collaborates, communicates, and operates. Today’s UC solutions include access to email, voice, IM and presence awareness, Web conferencing, and collaboration tools.

A recent CDW-G “Unified Communications Tracking Poll” showed that Unified Communications implementation rates have doubled year over year. Among the findings, respondents ranked increased employee productivity and reduced operating costs as the leading benefits of UC – factors that are important to all of us.

Some other key points:

• 20% of medium and large businesses say their UC solution is fully implemented, compared to 2% one year ago
• 54% of IT managers report the top benefit of UC is reduced operating costs
• 71% of organizations that have implemented UC report that UC ROI has met or exceeded their expectations
• Among health care organizations, more reliable communication is a top benefit of UC

With today’s mobile workforce, people need to access all their information from everywhere, and from all sorts of devices, causing UC adoption rates to steadily grow over the past two years. Industry analysts agree that the growth in adoption of UC will continue to grow at aggressive rates over the next two years. This growth includes customers implementing on-premise solutions, as well as those implementing cloud solutions.

According to the poll, over 75 percent of respondents indicated cloud computing enabled faster UC deployment. Why should you deploy your UC solution in the cloud?

• Easy and fast to deploy 
• No additional capital expenditure required (servers, infrastructure, etc.)
• Less up-front time designing, installing, and configuring the solution
• Sign up, install the client, and you are ready to go
• More cost effective
• Pay only for the services you need for your end users
• More flexible of a solution
• Solution scales to meet your company’s growth needs
• Customize the solution to fit your users’ needs
• Less maintenance
• No ongoing patching of the servers, infrastructure devices, etc.
• No high-end engineer hours needed to monitor and maintain the solution

If your organization is looking to implement a Unified Communications solution, check out Apptix to see what we have to offer.

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Lessons from the Field – How Apptix is Leading the Way in Channel Partnerships

[This guest blog by Aubrey Smoot, Apptix Vice President of Business Development, originally appeared on BeanSprout - an organization that aims to connect businesses together so that they can create meaningful partnerships to grow and enhance their business.]


We attended the Parallels Summit in Orlando recently, where we met the fine folks at BeanSprout and got into a long, philosophical discussion about the need to truly understand the business model of your channel before you can successfully build your brand within it. Based on our Parallels presentation, I’d like to take this opportunity to share some of what we’ve learned as we’ve built the Apptix partner program over the past few years.

To Build Your Channel, You Must Understand the Channel Itself

That sounds pretty obvious, doesn’t it? What I mean is that you need to know up front what kinds of partners are in your channel, what they want, how they want to do it, and how much visibility and functionality they want.

• Size. Channels range from boutique IT services organizations to giant telcos and mega-corporations.


• Ability. Business models range from providers that need help supporting the accounts receivable process to API-level integration between the partner’s existing billing systems and the service provider’s provisioning.


• Geography. Geography ranges from local to international.


• Visibility. Service providers can be fully visible to end users, behind a private label option where the customer never knows a different service provider is involved, or anywhere in between.

Apptix partners runs the gamut, from small regional resellers harnessing the Apptix brand name to multi-national companies offering Apptix services through an entirely private-labeled offering with no brand recognition.

Have a Strategy for Each Type of Channel Partner

Once you know as much as possible about the market, you need be sure you have a strategy for how you’re going to handle each business model represented within the channel.

This pyramid image is a helpful guide for how we see the channel, and the opportunities that go with it.

Let’s start at the bottom of the pyramid and work our way up to the larger enterprise-class organizations.

• Referrals. You may have many small, diverse organizations providing referral sales. These organizations need the service provider to maintain the necessary technological infrastructure and to provide support. While these are your largest opportunity in terms of sheer numbers, you must strike a balance that ensures your services are helpful to the client while the relationship remains profitable for you.


• Smaller Resellers. These may be small IT services companies that want to add your products to their existing portfolios. They want to use the larger, more established service provider’s name to add credibility to their new offerings, but do not have the staff to handle things like monthly recurring payments.


• Larger Resellers. These companies are more established and already provide an array of IT services. They have the infrastructure to handle almost everything and want to maintain their own brand and identity, adding your services to their portfolios while still being able to provide the customer a single, unified bill. Most of these larger resellers will opt for a private-label solution, where the service provider is behind the scenes but still provides technical and marketing support.


• Enterprise-class Private Label Partners. These are world-class organizations that can bring high volume or large deals. They want to provide services that complement their core offerings or value-added services without the customer realizing another service provider is at work. Technical APIs let customers purchase and provision services directly through the partner’s shopping cart, accounts are managed through their customized control panel, and the partner provides direct customer support backed by the service provider’s technical staff when necessary.

Streamline Your Processes, Maintain Your Margins

Here at Apptix, we have specific partner programs for each type and cater to their needs in ways that are still beneficial to our own bottom line. One of the keys for us has been to standardize onto a central platform for all provisioning, control, reporting, and management needs. By doing that, we have been able to bring products from multiple suppliers into a single, easy-to-use platform that helps support multiple business models. It also allows us the flexibility to add services as necessary to keep up with market demands and the demands of our partners and their clients.

This single platform allows us the economies of scale to be competitive in an industry that is very price sensitive. We have a fiscal responsibility to our suppliers to account for their services, and to our shareholders to provide efficient, cost-effective solutions.

Apptix is always looking for new partners. We are the premier provider of hosted business communication services for organizations of all sizes, with particular expertise serving legal, financial, and health care firms. Our extensive product portfolio includes integrated solutions (e.g. Unified Communications) and point solutions including Microsoft Exchange, VoIP, SharePoint, Web Conferencing, and Secure IM with Presence. We deliver our services over a highly reliable network that leverages best-in-class technology, is housed in SAS 70-compliant data centers, and is backed by U.S.-based 24/7 support.

Apptix lets partners expand customer offerings and add new recurring revenue streams. Channel partners turn to us for our industry-leading on-boarding and migration expertise, award-winning support, robust margins, white-label offerings, and digital marketing assets. The entire partner experience is extremely flexible and customizable, with options for Apptix to handle internal and external support, billing, accounts receivable, and provisioning.

Want to join us? Visit our BeanSprout profile or our partner website.

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The IT Guy: My Inbox is Out of Control! Tips to Manage Your Email and Save Your Sanity

By Mike Warstler, Apptix IT Manager

Is your email inbox, or your employees’ email inboxes, growing out of control? Are you thinking about getting huge hosted Exchange mailboxes (10GB, 25GB, or even unlimited) so you never have to worry about email storage again?

We’ve been in the hosted Exchange business for over a decade and I’m here to tell you – you don’t want to do that. As even Microsoft will tell you, extra large mailboxes cause a variety of problems from slow backups and searches to data corruption.

At Apptix, we give employees 2GB mailboxes, and you know what? It’s plenty. We follow industry best practices, teach Apptix employees how to keep their inboxes manageable, and send warnings to users approaching their limit.

Here are a few tips to keep your Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2010 inbox under control and within your limit, including:

·         Understanding how much storage you are using

·         AutoArchiving old email

·         Automatically emptying your Deleted Items

·         Searching for and deleting large attachments

We’ll go through Outlook 2007 first, then do the same steps in Outlook 2010.

Got your own tips for taming the email beast? Share with us in the comments.

Managing Your Outlook 2007 Mailbox

How much storage am I using?

Select “Tools,” then “Mailbox Cleanup.” 

Select “View Mailbox Size.”

Select the “Server Data” tab.

“Total size (including subfolders)” is the total amount of storage you’re using on the Exchange server in KB. To convert it to MB, divide your storage by 1024 (Example: 205079 / 1024 = 200.27 MB).

How do I AutoArchive old email?

Select "Tools," then "Options." Select the "Other" tab, then the "AutoArchive" button.

Here you can customize your AutoArchive settings. Below, I have it set to run every 14 days and archive items older than six months. Once completed, I select “Apply these to all folders now,” then hit “OK.” My email will be AutoArchived from now on.

How do I automatically empty deleted items?

Select “Tools,” then “Options.” Check the box “Empty the Deleted Items folder upon exiting.”

How do I find large email attachments?

Expand “Search Folders.” Select “Large Mail.” It will take a few minutes for Outlook to display your large mail. Deleting mail items with large attachments or saving the attachments to your computer will greatly reduce your storage size.

Now, let’s answer those same questions for Outlook 2010 users.

Managing Your Outlook 2010 Mailbox

How much storage am I using?

Select File and look under “Mailbox Cleanup” where it shows your available storage space.

How do I AutoArchive old email?

Select the “Folder” tab, then “AutoArchive Settings.”

Select the “AutoArchive” tab, then the “Archive items in this folder using the default settings.”

Select the “Default Archive Settings…” button.

Here you can customize your AutoArchive settings. Below I have it set to run every 14 days and archive items older than six months. Once completed, select “Apply these to all folders now,” then hit “OK.” Going forward my email will be AutoArchived.

How do I automatically empty deleted items?

Select “File,” then “Options.”

Select “Advanced,” then “Empty Deleted Items folders when exiting Outlook.”

How do I find large email attachments?

Expand “Search Folders.” Select “Large Mail.” It will take a few minutes for Outlook to display your large mail. Deleting mail items with large attachments or saving the attachments to your computer will greatly reduce your storage size.

I hope this helps you keep your inbox under control. Any other tips you’d like to share? Any other questions for me? Let me know in the comments. 

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The VoIP Guys: Ray & Dave Explain Why VoIP Routers are Worth Their Cost

While most reputable VoIP providers strongly recommend you use a router specifically designed for VoIP traffic, you might wonder if a VoIP-ready router is worth the extra cost. If your business depends on your phone, the answer is yes, and here’s why.

The router is a critical component to call quality. Most routers you get from the cable company or the clearance bin at the local electronics store are simply not capable of effectively handling VoIP. VoIP-ready routers provide the following benefits:

1. QoS – Quality of Service
2. SIP Server Survival Mode
3. WAN Link Redundancy

1. Quality of Service, or QoS: On a network that shares voice and data, a QoS-capable router gives priority to voice traffic. This is vital when you’re talking on the phone while someone on your network is sending or receiving a big file or downloading a video; without prioritizing the traffic, your call quality might suffer. When there’s no voice traffic, the full bandwidth is available to data traffic. The router applies QoS mechanisms to upstream and downstream traffic independently. This is especially useful when downstream bandwidth is greater than upstream bandwidth and limiting downstream data to the slower upstream rate would be undesirable.


2. SIP Server Survival Mode: A VoIP router can re-route calls locally or over the ‘regular’ phone lines (the PSTN) during WAN link failures. You can rest assured that when disaster strikes, you’re covered; even if your primary Internet connection goes out, you can still get calls on remaining phone lines.


3. WAN Link Redundancy: Many organizations have two Internet connections – one primary, and one backup. By default, voice and data traffic go through the primary connection. If the primary link fails, a VoIP router will route traffic through the backup path and, when possible, automatically return it back to the primary path once it’s back up and running. The network administrator can also manually switch the traffic when necessary.

VoIP routers are often more expensive, but the peace of mind they bring in QoS, survivability, and redundancy are well worth it if your business relies on always-available phone service.

Do you have any other advice to share on what to look for in a VoIP router? Share with us in the comments.

Ray Pedroso and Dave Schall specialize in Voice over IP (VoIP) systems at Apptix. The Apptix VoIP solution delivers the standard features you have come to expect in a corporate-level phone system, including number portability, extension dialing, find me/follow me service, voicemail, caller ID, call forwarding, etc. In addition, Apptix includes Web-based system management tools to provide a quick and easy way to make changes to your phone system from any browser. You can contact them at voipguys [at] apptix.com.

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Customer Service How-To: Accessing Support Documentation

By Craig McLemore, Knowledge Manager

We try to make things as user-friendly as possible, and a lot of our hosting infrastructure is highly automated so you can get up and running without needing our help. Our “on-boarding” support includes using the Control Panel to create mailboxes, contacts, groups, etc.; setting up profiles for mail clients; and BlackBerry setup and resets.

After that, some users need advanced troubleshooting that requires help from our operations department, and some users need help for basic tasks that we cover during the on-boarding process and is explained in our extensive support documentation. When that’s necessary, we have additional, paid support.

Here’s an overview of what’s considered a “chargeable event.”

To help you avoid these charges, let’s go over how to access the support documentation and some quick tips and tricks.

You can access support documentation either via the Control Panel or via the Apptix website.

From the Control Panel
If you’re an administrator, chances are you spend a fair amount of time in the Apptix Control Panel managing and configuring things. Once you’ve logged in with your username and password, just click on Help & Support either on the bottom of the left-margin navigation or in the right-side list. A second window displays separate lists of documents for end users and documents for administrators.

Note: Support documentation is available only through the Admin access of the Control Panel. End users do not have the Help & Support menu option in their Control Panel.

From the Apptix Website
Whether you’re an administrator or an end user, you can access the support documentation through the Apptix website; no username and password is required. On the Support page, under “Support Documentation,” choose either 'Technical Admins' or 'End User' to access the list of support documents.

However you get to the documentation, the list is organized by product/service (Control Panel, Exchange, SharePoint, etc.) so that you can find the right information as quickly as possible. You can open each PDF in your browser simply by clicking on the link, or right-click | Save link as… to download documents to your hard drive.

Tip: Downloaded PDFs contain bookmarks to assist with document navigation; bookmarks are not present when opening the PDF within a browser.

Your Feedback
We will post a series of “How-To Blogs” of the most common support-related issues and solutions. We welcome your feedback to help us prioritize the order and scope of these posts so that we provide information that is useful to your business.

Please leave any requests and feedback in the comments section.

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Making Life Easier for IT Managers

By Sheldon Smith, Product Manager

When I first started my career I thought it would be awesome to be an IT manager. I’d get to play with all the cool new toys! I’d configure networks, work on hardware, install software, set up printers, and more. Back then resources were plentiful – you may have had 5-10 IT staff for your company of 200 employees – but time was short. You had to answer internal support calls and run from workstation to workstation, from floor to floor.

Those resource-heavy days are gone – now you’re lucky to have 5 IT people for your 1000 person company. Resources are tight and time is even shorter. Computers are more complex, requiring patches, updates, maintenance, etc. Factor in new hires and terminations, error messages, drivers, security, bandwidth … well, this list could finish the rest of the blog. IT administrators have challenges and need solutions.

Apptix helps address many of these challenges. Hosted Applications by Apptix allows admins to save time, money, and resources by deploying software products across all users in a single, web-based portal. How does this work, exactly? Users log into a central URL, where they can see all of the available products assigned to them. Administrators assign or remove application access from our simple control panel. No more running from desk to desk installing software!

Easy, isn’t it?

Imagine the time and resources you’ll save! Think about it - each new hire requires building access, a computer with your image installed (which you may need to modify later), account(s) set up, and more. With Apptix you could have all the necessary software and email accounts set up and configured in no time. You just log into the control panel, create/add a new user, select the products and services they have access to, and then send their credentials. Users even get preconfigured cloud storage to save their files in.

Hosting applications also makes financial sense. You can rent your car, house, and almost anything else, so why buy permanent versions of products when you only need to use them for a short period of time? Why not rent them? For example, if you needed a specific product for a specific project but didn’t want to purchase the full (and expensive) license, you could ‘rent’ that product from Apptix for a few months and still have money left in the budget.

Now that the good ol’ days of large IT teams are gone, why not outsource some of your efforts to save time and effort and increase your efficiency, plus have a little money left over? Is there a specific application you think we should host that would make your job easier? Let me know in the comments section.

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