Business Category Archives

What to Say When You Are Let Down

Scott Cover - July 18th, 2008 | Comments(0)
My long trusty Dell Dimension 9100 started overheating last week due to a power supply fan failure. This machine has been extremely faithful to me and for being a first generation dual core system, I can’t complain about my experiences with the box at all. I ordered a PC Power and Cooling unit to [...]

Comcast Customer Service Improvements

Scott Cover - July 18th, 2008 | Comments(0)
About a month or so ago I went through some issues trying to get my Comcast bill reduced to match an offer that was posted on their website. After not quite getting anywhere with the people on the other end of the phone I took some clues from Consumerist.com and performed an EECB. Surprisingly enoug[...]

Exclusive: AccessEnforcer GUI Update Preview

Scott Cover - July 16th, 2008 | Comments(2)
I recently was shown some preview shots of the new GUI for the upcoming revamp of Calyptix’s AccessEnforcer, and I have to say I am looking forward to the new style. I think the new major navigation icons at the top are a wonderful addition and will make a very easy to use product even easier to n[...]

Symantec Taking Out The Little Guys

Scott Cover - July 15th, 2008 | Comments(0)
I was pointed to an article over on ChannelWeb about Symantec moving away from a partner channel and focusing more on direct sales to their customers. According to the article: … Symantec is making moves to take its largest 900 customers from partners and hand them over to its direct sales te[...]

How to Address Your Audience during a Hiccup

Scott Cover - July 2nd, 2008 | Comments(0)
This past year has been a rather busy year for hosted services having major issues due to massive failures at data center facilities. Places like The Planet have been affected, and most recently Autotask had an outage. This was of the most interest to me as I am an Autotask customer, and wanted to t[...]

Becoming a CEO

Scott Cover - June 28th, 2008 | Comments(0)
I’ve long held a dream of running my own company, and that dream became a reality last year with the start of my consulting company. For the first year it has basically been a sole proprietorship, with me wearing every hat that the company needed to get the job done. The past couple months I’ve [...]

Learning to Loath Tape

Scott Cover - June 13th, 2008 | Comments(0)
I have long been a proponent of removing tape as a primary backup medium, with the exception of long term offsite archival storage, and this week has clearly reminded me why I no longer recommend tape backups for my clients. The scenario that has reminded me why is as follows: 13 DLT-IV tapes [...]

The First Rate Increase

Scott Cover - June 9th, 2008 | Comments(0)
I’m planning on rolling out our first ever rate increase to our legacy clients that will be going into effect the first of July. This is going to affect a lot of long term clients I’ve worked with for years, but weren’t the right fit for the managed services focus that I currently provide to m[...]

Using Poor Customer Service to Drive Sales

Scott Cover - June 9th, 2008 | Comments(0)
Not that long ago I upgraded my primary home workstation with some larger hard drives, effectively doubling the internal storage capacity of my machine. I ordered the drives through Dell (Yes, I know, probably my first mistake), mostly because they were on sale, I had a coupon for an additional amou[...]

Working Together To Solve Problems

Scott Cover - June 5th, 2008 | Comments(5)
When the very near term inclusion of an outsourced company assisting with our onsite services to our clients became a reality, I very seriously began to look at various collaboration resources. I did not travel the popular Basecamp route here; instead I’m using a product called Central Desktop. Ce[...]