LANcom Technology Blog

Worried that your website might be hacked or infected by malware? Sucuri is free service which can monitor your website and detect any unauthorised changes. Sucuri takes a snap shot of your website and then regularly checks your site for changes, if it finds any Sucuri will alert you by email.

To use Sucuri all you need to do is:

1. Enter the site you would like to monitor and sign up with an email and password.
2. Sucuri will then send you an email with a link for you to click.
3. Once you are logged in you can then decide what you would like to monitor and select how often you would like Sucuri to check it e.g. daily, every hour, or every 20 minutes. Note you may have to wait about 20 minutes after signing up before you can edit your settings. 

To visit the Sucuri website click here

Hat tip to MakeUseOf for the idea for this post.

Thank you to everyone who attended our Avert Code Red seminar at the Crowne Plaza yesterday. We really enjoyed putting on this event and hope to put on more seminars in the future.

We are happy to say that this event went off without a hitch and all in all we thought it was a great success.

If you missed it and would like to know more about how you can protect your business from email and web based threats, or if you’d like to know more about email continuity please contact Owen Redmond at owner@lancom.co.nz.

Click here to read a previous post on this event

Can’t remember the name of that movie you wanted to see? Bing is currently trying out a new feature called visual search, which helps you find what you’re looking for even when you can’t remember what it’s called.

Instead of displaying links, visual search show row of images which you can scroll through. Below you can see a search for ‘Movies in theatres’. This search displays movie covers and to the left there are options for narrowing your search by genre, rating, and 3D.

Visual search is currently only available for 39 popular categories like Popular books, Top songs, and Digital cameras.

If you would like to try out visual search then you can go to www.bing.com/visualsearch, but you may need to set your country to United States in the top left of the screen for it to work.

Looking for just the right picture for your website, PowerPoint presentation, or marketing material? Freerange Stock is a website that provides quality stock photos that are free to use for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.

To download pictures from Freerange Stock all you need to do is register with an email address, user name, and password. All the pictures on this site are in JPG format and are around 1mb to download.

To give you some idea of the types of photos available I’ve included some in this post.

To visit the Freerange Stock website and start searching click here.

Hat tip to MakeUseof.com for the idea for this post

Avert Code Red is a free two-part breakfast seminar hosted by LANcom and MessageLabs to let you know all about how you can protect your business from major email outages and malicious Cybercriminal attacks.

Part 1 of this seminar will cover how you can protect your business from Trojans, viruses, and spyware, as well as unintentional damage caused by staff misusing the internet or email. Part 2 will look at how you can implement email continuity to prevent email outages in the event of a natural disaster or server failure.

This event is taking place on the Thursday the 24^th of September from 8:00am till 9:30am. If you would like to attend please contact Owen Redmond at owner@lancom.co.nz or on 09 377 8282 ext 112 before Friday the 18^th of September.

Just learning a new Office application or looking to improve your skills? The CustomGuide website has a great selection of quick reference guides covering pretty much every Office Application as well as some Adobe and Mac programs. They include guides for: Access, Excel, FrontPage, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Project, Publisher, SharePoint, Visio, and Word.

CustomGuide also has different guides for different versions of Office so no matter what version your using there’s a guide for you.

To visit the CustomGuide website and download these guides Click here.

We are happy to announce the release our latest free information report ‘Free technologies that could improve your business 2′.

This report is a follow up to our first free technologies report and includes another 6 free technologies which you may find useful for your business.

The topics covered in this report include: Easy collaboration, website traffic analysis, syncing files across computers, website creation, server virtualisation, and Office 2010.

If you would like a copy of this report please contact Owen Redmond at owner@lancom.co.nz or 09 377 8282 ext 112.

If you would like to download a copy of the first free technologies report click here to visit the LANcom Library.

Looking for a free and easy way to set up an email newsletter? MailChimp is an email newsletter sending service which allows you to send newsletters to up to 500 subscribers for free. It even allows you to create great looking Html newsletters without you needing to know any code.

So what else is great about MailChimp?

• Plain text or Html – With MailChimp you can create plain text emails, upload your own Html email design, or use the MailChimp editor to easily create great looking Html emails based off one of their templates.
• Track what is happening to your emails – MailChimp will track the emails you send and let you know things like how many were opened, how many bounced (could not be sent due to incorrect email address), how many unsubscribed, and the click through rate of any links you have within your emails.
• Easy list management – MailChimp allows you to import your email send out lists from Excel, Salesforce, or Highrise and automatically handles duplicates, bounces, and unsubscribers.
• Free subscribe forms – MailChimp also provides you with free subscription forms for you to embed in your website. All you have to do is cut and paste the code into your website and MailChimp will automatically manage subscriptions for you.

At LANcom we send out our newsletter through our customer relationship management system, but if you don’t have a system capable of doing this for you then you should definitely take a look at MailChimp. To visit the MailChimp website click here.

Important Note: Before you send out any electronic commercial messages don’t forget that under New Zealand Law you must gain consent, include your business name and contact information, and offer an unsubscribe option. To find out more about the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 click here.