JAN 2013 • VOLUME 5• ISSUE 1

Speed Up Your

Internet

2

Tech Tip of the

Month/The Techie

Dictionary

2

From the CEO’s

desk—

Improvements

over The Last

Year

3

10 things we do

better than our

competitors

4

Follow us: www.facebook.com/tdcnet www.twitter.com/tdcnet

Our Mission is to use

technical wonder to wow businesses.

WHAT’S INSIDE

It’s that time of year again – New

Year’s Resolution time! It’s a great time

for all of us to look at our businesses and

see how we can improve to hit our goals.

We have a renewed focus this year on

helping all of our clients use technology to

improve productivity and we’ve suggested

some resolutions you can make to do ex-

actly that.

Proactive maintenance – your

computers and servers need constant

maintenance to ensure

they are secure and

running as fast as pos-

sible. Unfortunately

many people take their

car to get the oil

changed more often

than running mainte-

nance on their net-

work. A good mainte-

nance plan prevents problems, gets rid of

annoying pop ups and increases productiv-

ity for everyone.

Say goodbye to those Windows

XP machines – this operating system is

reaching end of life and if you have any-

one left in your office using a Windows

XP machine it’s time to replace their com-

puter. Computers using XP are slower,

have more security holes and generally

lead to less productive staff.

Speed up the internet – as more

business is done online using applications

hosted in the Cloud, the pressure on a

conventional business internet line is in-

creasing. We’re seeing for a lot of offices

that upgrading their internet line can im-

prove

productivity for everyone.

Get the wireless working well –

more tablets, smartphones and laptops are

appearing in offices around the GTA and

it’s critical wireless is working well. Imple-

menting a commercial grade wireless net-

work using linked access points is a must

now and an improvement we’ve imple-

mented lately for many businesses.

Standardize – standardizing the

computers in use, their setup and the pro-

cesses surrounding all parts of

your IT will eliminate problems

and dramatically improve produc-

tivity. “Custom” is a dirty word in

the IT world because it frequently

leads to solving one issue and

creating many new ones.

Spare computer – even with

extensive proactive work, com-

puters can sometimes have hard-

ware malfunctions. If you have a spare

computer in the office, you can limit this

disruption by quickly moving the user to

a spare computer instead of having them

unproductive for a day.

Tablet/Smartphone strategy –

one of the biggest changes over the last

year was the increasing use of tablets and

“super phones” as part of day-to-day

business. These devices in many cases

have the same type of access to your

network that computers do and you

must have a strong strategy for how to

manage and secure them.

As always, we’re here to help you

improve your business. Give us a call if

you’d like help with any of your IT new

Year’s Resolutions!

New Year’s Resolutions

Monthly Tips and Tricks on How to Prevent Pesky Computer Problems While Improving the Security, Performance and Reliability of Your Technology (Plus a Little Fun From the TDCNet Team!)

Managing Uptime

TECH TIP OF THE MONTH

Printing Multiple Files:

1. First, go to the location of the files you want to print. 2. Select all of the files you want to print.

3. Right click on the selected files, and select ’Print’ from the menu that appears.

Techie Dictionary

DVR: This stands for ‘Digital Video Recorder’. A

DVR is basically a VCR that uses a hard drive

instead of videotapes. It can be used to record,

save, and play back television programs. Unlike

a VCR, a DVR can also pause live TV.

Recent Blog Post from www.tdcnet.ca

Speed Up Your Internet

MANAGING UPTIME PAGE 2

One of the challenges many businesses are having the-

se days is that their internet connections just aren’t fast

enough for their business and they are not sure what to do

about it.

This stems from the fact that standard cable or ADSL

Internet lines that businesses have used for years are no

longer good enough because of how much is done online

or remotely from your office. I’ve been spending a lot of

time lately helping clients improve their Internet connectiv-

ity and I thought it would be useful to spend some time on

this on our blog.

So here’s an overview of the connectivity op-

tions your business has and some advice when

you’re considering your options.

Firstly, you must have two Internet connec-

tions for redundancy. It will cost your business

way too much if your Internet goes offline for a few hours

and you can get a backup for as little as $30/month.

Next, you need to ask yourself how important speed is

with your Internet connection. If a lot of the applications

you use are hosted offsite or if you deal with large files

(such as video or design files) regularly, you will need a bet-

ter line.

Most people don’t know there are lots of options avail-

able so I wanted to give a quick rundown of what’s out

there. Note, internet speeds are measures in megabits per

second or Mbps, which is used to measure data transfer

speeds. The higher that is, the faster your internet line will

be.

ADSL - this is a standard Internet connection used by

many businesses. It uses the unused portion of traditional

phone lines. It starts at 6 Mbps (download and 800k/s up-

load. For most businesses this is too slow. Price is usually

around $60-$90/month.

VDSL2 - also using phone lines, this is a much newer

type of Internet connection and much faster. It can be 4

times faster than ADSL download speeds and almost 10

times faster uploads (25 Mbps down, 7 Mbps up). Price is

usually around $130-$150/month.

Cable - many businesses now get their Internet con-

nections through cable from Rogers. Provided its available

in your neighbourhood, this can be as fast as 12

Mbps down and 2 Mbps up. Price ranges from $50-

$170/month depending on speeds and whether you

need a static IP address, which most businesses

need.

Ethernet over Cable - this is the next step up in

terms of speed. You can get up to 10 Mbps upload and

download with this service, which is usually around $400-

$600/month. If you’re doing voice over your Internet lines

you’ll want at least this speed. Again availability is limited to

buildings wired with Rogers cable.

If you wish to read about more options, please go

online at www.tdcnet.ca. Hopefully that helps give you a bit

of an idea of your Internet options. The first thing you

need to consider is how many staff you have, what they use

the Internet for, if you use it for phone systems, video con-

ferencing or big uploads/downloads.

As always, give us a call and we can help you navigate

through these options and make the best choice for your

business!

- Written by Brendan Howe

Follow us on Twitter!

www.twitter.com/TDCNet Follow us on LinkedIn! www.linkedin.com/company/tdcnet-inc.

JAN 2013 • VOLUME 5• ISSUE 1 Page 3

2012 was a great year for TDCNet as we continued

to grow and mature our business to better serve our

clients.

When we make investments in our business, we feel

we're also making an investment is our clients' business-

es because of the direct impact it has. We've made a

number of these investments over the last few months,

including:

More Proactive

Steps for Fewer

Problems

We have

made huge in-

vestments of

both time and

money in up-

grading our re-

mote monitoring

and proactive

management

capabilities.

While there are a

number of areas

we've improved

here, one of the

most exciting is

deeper monitor-

ing and automat-

ed problem pre-

vention. We've taken numerous steps to improve our

ability to detect problems and run automated actions to

fix issues right away and keep your email, computer or

network from going down.

Maintenance for Higher Productivity and Security

We run weekly maintenance on all the computers

and servers we manage. This maintenance program is

one that we continually put in R&D hours to optimize

how things run and prevent issues. This will continue to

be a big focus and opportunity for us to improve

productivity for our clients in the New Year.

MACs and Apple devices

We’re seeing more businesses integrate MACs and

Apple devices into their Windows environments. We’ve

been researching and implementing new ways to moni-

tor and manage these devices which in the past have

been problematic. We are developing more and more

ways to have them integrate seamlessly into our clients’

environments.

More Technical Staff

for Faster Response

Times

We’ve boosted our num-

ber of technical staff to 7

which is a huge invest-

ment for us to be able to

provide much faster re-

sponse times to our cli-

ents, including what we’re

calling “Live Service

Desk”. When people

have issues, they can call

or email in and get help

right away as opposed to

waiting for call backs,

which is the case at many

of our competitors.

New Technical and

Service Management

I’m pleased to welcome Carl Giles as our new Ser-

vice Manager. Carl’s role is to ensure our client’s IT sys-

tems are being proactively managed, monitored and

maintained effectively and when users need support, it’s

quick and effective. We want all of our clients spending

less time managing their IT, which is why we’ve put in

place more resources to do this.

I’m excited about what this year has in store and we

have many more improvements on the way to both our

proactive level of support and the reactive support we

provide. Please give me a call any time to talk about

how we can help you!

- Brendan Howe, President and CEO, TDCNet Inc.

From The CEO’s Desk

Improvements Over The Last Year

TDCNet’s Secret Santa —Here our staff has just exchanged presents and they seem happy with their Secret Santa haul. Next

time you talk to them—ask them what they got. Happy New Year from our team to you!

We are the leaders in IT services for businesses in and around

the GTA. Here are 10 things we do better than our competitors:

We’ll Have a Technician Working on Your Issue in

60 Minutes or Less – Our Guarantee. Our experienced

qualified technicians will answer immediately or will re-

spond to your service request in less than sixty minutes –

Guaranteed.

Ultra Speedy Repairs. We know you don’t want to

waste your valuable time waiting for your computer to be

fixed so our remote network IT support services are the

answer. We can fix 93.5% of problems immediately by

taking control of your computer from our office. For any

problems that require an onsite visit, we’ll send a techni-

cian over.

We Talk Like You Do. If you have any problems or

computer support questions, you can ask and we will

answer in PLAIN ENGLISH. Don’t worry – there is no

“geek speak” by our team of IT support technicians.

We Guarantee Absolute 100% Satisfac-

tion. Complete satisfaction will be yours with our prod-

ucts, technology services and IT Consulting. With our IT

management services, nothing will get in the way to

make sure you are a happy customer.

We protect your critical business data and back it

up offsite. The most important part of your network is

your data (hardware and software can always be re-

placed). We back up your data securely offsite in case of

fire, flood, theft or hardware failure. We completely man-

age and monitor the process so you don’t need to worry

about taking tape or hard drives home with you and you

won’t lie awake at night wondering if your data is proper-

ly backed up.

We are far less expensive than hiring a full time

computer support staff. By outsourcing your computer

support to us, we can save you thousands of dollars on

hiring salaries and benefits. We have a proven track rec-

ord of reducing IT and internet costs, sometimes by

more than 50%!

We will give you fixed quotes on all work and prod-

uct. This ensures your project gets completed on budget

without any surprises at the end.

We proactively look for ways to improve your busi-

ness. We monitor your network 24/7 to prevent prob-

lems before they occur and will give you proactive sug-

gestions regularly to improve the way your business runs.

We integrate your IT and Internet services. When

you have an email or internet problem, you don’t have

to worry about calling five different people. We take care

of everything whether it’s your internet services, Black-

berry, server or individual computers.

We are always here to help. We have technicians on

call 24/7.

885 Don Mills Rd., Suite #112, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3C 1V9 Tel: 416.913.8998 | Toll-free: 1.866.483.2638 | Fax: 416.479.4157 Web: www.tdcnet.ca Email: helpdesk@tdcnet.ca

JAN 2013 • VOLUME 5• ISSUE 1 PAGE 4

Attention Business Owners: Check out 10 Things We Do Better Than Our Competitors

Tech Wonder Profile: Carl Giles This is a chance for you to find out a few things you didn’t know about the peo-

ple who work on our wonderful team! This month’s Tech Wonder is Carl Giles, who is the Service Manager of our

amazing Tech team. Carl is from Toronto and he has two children, Hayley who’s 10 and Carson, who’s 9. Carl has lived in the UK and California and travelled all over Europe and US.

He loves to watch Movies and TV, and keeping up with the entertainment indus-try. He’s hoping to do a Mudder or Triathlon in the summer. He loves Fettucine Alfredo and he loves going out to eat at funky restaurants with his wife Sherry.

Carl has 13 years of IT management experience that he will be using to help TDCNet’s clients.

The Tech Wonder Profile is a new series where we’ll be profiling a member of our great team. Carl Giles—Service Manager at TDCNet