IT Support

This week, one of our managed services customers sites went down due to a power failure. The site has a backup generator, but guess what? Their generator failed to start! While there is not much we can do for a customer that is entirely without power, there are things we have in place to get clients back up and running, the moment stable power returns. As soon as I received the notification that the power was down at the site, I knew something had gone wrong because I knew the site had a backup generator that should have automatically engaged within 30 seconds of a grid power loss. Except for this time, it didn’t kick on! I spoke with personnel at the site, and National Grid will not restore power for at least six hours. Downtime is extremely costly for this organization, so I immediately broke my schedule and headed to their location. Our plan was simple. We would get the servers back up and running as soon as power was restored to the site. At the time, we weren’t sure if it would be National Grid or the generator that would come on first, but one thing was for sure; downtime would be minimized as much as possible with this strategy.  All we needed was for power to come back and charge the battery backup systems to a safe level. I was confident that the information systems could quickly be brought online once the power came back because we had configured the battery backups to report to the servers that they were low on energy and that the servers should perform an orderly shutdown. Having this failsafe in place minimized risk by limiting the possibility of corruption of the server’s operating system. To summarize, there are a few things you should keep in mind when it comes to battery backups:  First, they are not intended to be a substitute for grid power or in place of a generator. Battery backups are not sized to be a long-term solution, but merely a stopgap intended to run the IT systems while you get your generator started or perform an orderly shutdown of your servers.  Second, UPS systems help you avoid sudden failures due to momentary blinks and brownouts. Third, when properly sized and configured, the UPS will send signals to your equipment to turn back on once the battery has recharged enough that it is safe to go back on the grid.

If you’re like me, you meet a lot of people and end up collecting a lot of business cards. Several years ago, serious business networkers had to have a special scanner for scanning business cards effectively. With our smartphones so powerful, and with such great cameras, there’s an app for that! Specialized card scanners are still around. Cardscan is probably the best and most popular, but I’m going to show you an application I use that only requires my phone’s camera. The app is called CamCard, and the screenshots I’m showing are of the application running on my Android phone. For my first example, I’m scanning Joseph D’Eramo’s card.  Joe is an outstanding copywriter with PR Works, a public relations firm in Plymouth Mass. After taking a picture of his card, CamCard immediately went to work parsing the image into recognizable fields and presenting it to me on the screen for editing. In the image above, on the far left, you can see the scan of Joe’s card along with the result.  From here, you can proofread the card for accuracy. As I touch into each field, the card app zooms in on the area of the scanned image to show you where it got that information from.  In the second photo, I clicked on Work phone, which shows me it obtained the data from the Direct Line section on the card. Next, I clicked on Website, and it zoomed right into www.prworkzone.com on the card photo so I could make sure the web site address was right. Joe’s card was relatively easy; it had black text on a white background, and the recognition was near 100% accurate. Now, watch what happened when I scanned Tom’s multi-colored card.  Tom is an expert security consultant with Beacon Protection and provides excellent burglary protection, video surveillance, fire and smoke monitoring, and access control systems for homes and businesses. Pictured below, the app created an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) enhanced version of the scanned card and used that rendering to parse the data into the correct fields. CamCard preserved the original image, which I show on the right, below. As you can see, CamCard had no problem at all parsing Tom’s card, even with its Yellow, Black and white colors. The application will let you keep notes on each contact too. I’ve gotten myself into the habit of including a memo that has the date and venue where I met the contact. I’ll often fill in details that will help me remember what they do and how they can help my contacts so I can refer them in the future. Once you’ve got the card scanned and proofread and save it, the contact details will be synced with your phone. You can then call the person or email them immediately if you like, without any extra steps to import the contacts. It’s also important to know that you can share the business card via email very easily. The recipient will get an email with the contact details (shown at left, below). If the recipient clicks the link at the bottom of the email message, they can view an image of the card on the CamCard site (shown at right, below), If the recipient is also a CamCard user, they can click Save to CardHolder to save it to their account. There are other apps and tools that you can use to scan cards, but CamCard is my favorite and lets you scan up to 500 cards without having to pay for a subscription.  You can download CamCard for your Android or iPhone from your phone’s Store app, or directly from links you can find on the CamCard web site.