reprinted with permission from HP

If you’re like most companies, as much as 90 percent of your corporate communications and business activities take place electronically. And, like most companies, you must live with the threat of legal actions that could trigger sweeping requests for this kind of information.

Your current records retention programs may not adequately address the creation, management and disposition of all your electronic records. To be prepared for potential litigation and e-discovery requests, your executives must be able to deliver accurate records at any time. This requires an e-discovery program that includes tight records management policies, clearly defined processes that are known throughout your organization, and solutions that enable you to manage your company records throughout their lifecycle.

Building a Comprehensive Program
To create a cross-enterprise program for litigation preparedness, you must bring together the right people, processes and technology that allow your company to manage risks. From a people and process perspective, there are five key steps that should be followed:

reprinted with premission from HP

Virtualization technology is a great way to increase business agility while reducing infrastructure costs. But it can also add another layer of management complexity, resulting in higher management costs and lower ROI. You need the right software tools to realize the full benefits of virtualization.

Managing virtualization becomes even more critical as virtualization projects move out of the development/test environments and into production. That’s why it needs to be incorporated into your operation management framework. Rather than manage virtualization as its own silo, a better approach is to integrate virtual and physical management—based on proven best practices. Then you can administer resources uniformly to monitor, manage and automate key management functions seamlessly across physical and virtual environments.

The results: dramatically reduced IT costs, improved business agility and the ability to increase IT efficiency. Here are the five key areas to accelerate and simplify the adoption of virtualization in your data center.

by Stuart Crawford, Ulistic, Inc.

LinkedIn is one of the industry leading social networks and online communities in use today across multiple businesses and industries. LinkedIn’s focus on business-to-business networking and facilitating the sharing of ideas and strategies has won the trust of business professionals globally. Not unlike many of their counterparts, LinkedIn does have privacy challenges according to many CEO level executives. Many organizations are now reviewing their policies related to LinkedIn and how information propagates through this business social network.

More and more business professionals are turning to LinkedIn because of its overall effectiveness in the marketplace. However, many are unaware of the apparent risks to corporate contacts when setting up their LinkedIn accounts. There are many settings that are on automatically allowing for browsing of contacts and also leaving a trace of who visited another profile. Many organizations as part of their social media acceptable use policy are now requiring specific changes to LinkedIn privacy settings be made ensuring business contacts and information are kept confidential.

LinkedIn is built on a community and like many other online networks; they embrace the sharing of information and contacts. How do businesses balance the foundations of LinkedIn with the compliance and confidentiality measures of business today?

The following recommended key privacy settings guidelines ideal for organizations leveraging LinkedIn to make sure a certain degree of privacy remains in place. These settings are accessible through the SETTINGS menu in the top right corner of your LinkedIn page.

by Stuart Crawford, Ulistic, Inc.

Business pros now spend about two hours a day managing their e-mail, according to recent surveys. That adds up to plenty of time to get into serious trouble.

"Ineffective, improper and incorrect use of electronic e-mail on company computers exposes organizations to wasted time, bad press, and the possibility of legal action," notes Al Borowski, a recognized expert in e-mail etiquette who runs a Pittsburgh-based communications training firm, Connect All the Dots.

It's hard to oversee the rush of e-mails that rocket in and out of your shop. Yet one wrong, ill-thought-out message is all it takes. Hit "send" and — poof. Irretrievable. Unless you clearly communicate standards and monitor your company's e-mail, there's a good chance e-mail miscues will happen — and come back to bite you.
Whether you run a business or not, here are some tips for e-mail manners in today's e-communication age.

by Christopher Elliott

Think hard now. Can you remember your first virtual meeting? For many of you, it was in the latter decades of the 20th century, and you likely called it a "teleconference." If so, chances are you can recall how simple — but expensive — the technology used to be.

Well, virtual meetings aren't expensive anymore.

But they're still relatively simple, even if you're talking now about meetings held via the Internet instead of by phone.

In fact, getting up and running with Web conferencing software today is so easy that virtually anyone with a PC and an Internet connection can do it. For example, it took me less than two minutes to sign up for Microsoft Office Live Meeting's free 14-day trial.

If it's that easy, how much harder can holding a Web conference be?

Careful. That's not as easy (as getting high-quality Web conferencing software). You can make mistakes. And blowing a Web meeting can cost your business money — either in lost sales (if it's a sales presentation) or in lost productivity (if it's a staff meeting).

There are a plenty of surveys today on how a Web meeting can boost your bottom line, but few, if any, that address what happens when those Web meetings bomb. And that's no surprise, because no one likes to talk about their slip-ups, virtual or otherwise.

So, before you jump into a Web conference, let's review some of the most common Web conferencing errors, and discuss what can be done to prevent them.

used with permission from Microsoft at Work

Have you ever run out of battery power on your mobile PC during a meeting or a class? Have you worried about running out of power while waiting to meet with a client? Have you asked yourself how much longer your battery will last? Sufficient battery life is a persistent challenge for mobile PC users. But Windows offers several ways to help maximize the battery life of your mobile computer.

In this article, I'll discuss how to take advantage of Windows settings to manage power more efficiently. I'll also introduce some non-software related tips that you can use to extend battery life.

Do you have an effective way to process and organize your email so that you can get to an empty Inbox on a routine basis? If you have lots of email in your Inbox (we know people with as many as 7,000 messages), you might want to rethink your processing methods. Really, it is possible to empty your Inbox. The key is to evaluate how you are processing and organizing your email and then make some changes.

No doubt you've opened an email and thought, "Hmmm, not sure what to do with this. I'll deal with it later!"—and promptly closed the message. If you do this over and over again, it doesn't take long to end up with several hundred—or even several thousand—messages in your Inbox.

Developing a new approach to processing your Inbox can help you to gain more control, improve your response time, and keep up with critical actions and due dates.

This article covers four key factors that can help you process your email more efficiently.

used with permission from Microsoft at Work

Whether you're leaving the office for the holidays, going on vacation, or taking a business trip, there are a number of things you can do to prepare your computer for your time away. Canceling appointments and letting people know you'll be gone are just a few of the things you can do to make sure your responsibilities are covered and people aren't trying to meet with you. Here are some best practices to make sure your work goes on smoothly, even when you're gone.

Decline upcoming meetings
Decline or cancel any upcoming meetings that are scheduled while you're gone. Co-workers will not expect you to be at meetings and will know not to attend recurring meetings you run. To decline a meeting using Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 and 2007, simply complete the following:

1. Open the meeting occurrence and click Decline.
2. If you're the organizer of the meeting, either send a cancellation or arrange for a co-worker to run the meeting.
   • To cancel the meeting in Outlook 2003, open the meeting occurrence and in the Actions menu click Cancel Meeting.
   • To cancel the meeting in Outlook 2007, simply select the meeting tab and select the Cancel Meeting icon.

Article re-printed courtesy of IBM ForwardView eMagazie 

Security breaches continued to make big headlines in 2009. And the outlook for 2010 is that we are likely to see more Internet-based breaches as more activity occurs online via browsers and e-mail. That's largely because the paradigm has shifted in the way we work, behave as consumers and even interact with each other. As more systems and devices become interconnected, we're harnessing new ways of communicating, accessing shared systems and information. But this progress also exposes organizations to risk by creating more entry points for hackers.

According to Daniel Holden, project manager at X-Force, IBM's renowned security research organization, "The simple fact of the matter is there are more and more hosts, more and more people on the Internet every day," Holden explains. "There are more applications put on the Internet every day. It is going to get worse just because of the numbers involved." Holden should know. The X-Force team is one of the best-known commercial security research groups in the world. This group of security experts researches vulnerabilities, develops assessment and countermeasure technology, and advises the public on emerging Internet threats. And it does so by analyzing millions of intrusions and billions of Web pages annually.

So how do you safeguard your company against security breaches that U.S. Secretary of State Clinton has described as being the electronic equivalent of weapons of mass destruction? Understanding where security threats are most likely to hit can help your business take the appropriate measures to avoid becoming a cybercrime statistic.