I want to bring you up to date on a few things happening over on this end, then recap the best ways to reach us when you need IT support.

OPERATIONAL UPDATES

NEW TEAM MEMBERS

We’ve added two new members to the BDPNetworks Support Team: Ken LaForce and Nathan Finch. Both bring unique experience and talents to the team and are extremely pleasant to work with. Say “Hi!” the next time you see them around your office!

NEW SERVICE MANAGER

Christopher Shaw has accepted the position of Service Manager. This means he is now directly responsible for allocating resources to handle support requests. He meets regularly with the support team to ensure issues are being resolved quickly and correctly. If you have questions or comments about our service, please contact him at cshaw@bdpnetworks.com.

INVOICING DELAYS

We have had some delays in invoicing over the past few months. You should start to see activity on this front in the next couple of weeks.

2009: THE YEAR OF VIRTUALIZATION

Our big technology push in 2009 was virtualization: an inexpensive way to extend the ability and life of your server hardware. This worked out better than expected — every server we installed in 2009 has a virtualization layer on it which will lead to reduced hardware & energy costs over the next several years, even for the smallest organizations. We’re going to continue developing this strategy in 2010.

2010: THE YEAR OF BUSINESS CONTINUITY

Our big technology push in 2010 is Business Continuity. Our new Business Continuity and Data Recovery service plans combine the best of on-site data protection with off-site replication. They eliminate the need for backup tapes and give us the ability to restore a “virtual” copy of a failed server–either on-site or off-site–in under an hour. We’re pretty excited about this as it goes far beyond rudimentary online backup schemes. I’ll be discussing this in-depth at a later date, but if you have questions about it in the interim feel free to ask!

HOW TO REQUEST SUPPORT

We work very hard to make it easy to reach us, so here’s a quick recap on how to get help when you need it:

URGENT REQUESTS

If your request is URGENT – such as any issue that severely impacts your ability to do your work or severely impacts the entire organization (such as an e-mail outage) and there are no obvious workarounds,

CALL US at 206-329-6600 and select option 1 during business hours.

We are sometimes all on other calls, so if you don’t get through to a human right away don’t panic. Our goal is to return your call as soon as humanly possible — usually in well under fifteen minutes.

Please note that your organization may have a policy which requires you to submit all of your IT support requests through an internal designated IT liaison or IT administrator.

ALL OTHER REQUESTS

If your request is NOT urgent we strongly recommend you use our e-mail-based support ticketing system:

Send a message to support@bdpnetworks.com and include a short description of the problem in the Subject line of your e-mail.

You will receive a ticket ID number from our system within about five minutes of your submission. Hold on to this ticket ID e-mail because you can add information to the case simply by replying to the e-mail. Our goal by the end of April 2010 is to respond to all e-mail-based support requests within one business hour.

Please note that your organization may have a policy which requires you to submit all of your IT support requests through an internal designated IT liaison or IT administrator.

ASSISTANCE OUTSIDE OF BUSINESS HOURS

If you know you will need assistance outside of our normal business hours (8am-6pm Monday through Friday except holidays), contact us ahead of time through support@bdpnetworks.com and we’ll make sure the on-call engineer knows about your needs. If you think you might unexpectedly need assistance outside of our normal business hours on a semi-regular basis, contact me directly and I’ll go over some options we have which will extend your service plan with additional off-hours coverage.

CUSTOMER PORTAL

You may not be aware that we offer a web-based customer portal with which you can login and look at the status of all of your open tickets at any time. If you are not already taking advantage of this incredibly useful FREE service, please e-mail me and I’ll set up your account.

WHAT’S NEXT?

We are happy and thankful that we’ve been extremely busy lately and I hope your team is busy, as well. I’ve got a lot more to cover over the next few months in these updates – with topics related to security, spyware, and Windows 7 upgrades – so keep your eyes open. In the interim check out our blog at http://bdpnetworks.com/blog

If you have any questions at all about anything, please don’t hesitate to ask! My e-mail is bdp@bdpnetworks.com

Thank you for your time,

-Brian (Principal)

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