September is National Preparedness Month, driven this year by Agility Recovery, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Ready Campaign, and Citizen Corps. This campaign is an effort to encourage Americans to prepare for emergencies, whether it is at their homes, workplace, or communities.

The percentage of small- to medium-sized businesses that never recover after a disaster is staggeringly high, especially since the steps to putting together a disaster recovery plan are simple.

You never know when disaster might strike. In the past month, the Eastern PA region has experienced an earthquake, a hurricane and a tropical storm and several tornado warnings. The impact of the weather in August and September resulted in down power lines, damaged buildings and excessive flooding and interruption to many businesses. TS TECH and our customers were not significantly impacted by any of these events, but this should serve as a reminder that anyone could be impacted by a disaster at any time. All TS TECH Managed IT customers receive backup monitoring to help ensure their data is being backed up, but backing up your data is only a small piece of a much larger puzzle. Your businesses can recover if you have an effective disaster recovery plan.

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If you have questions about how TS TECH can assist with Disaster Recovery Planning, contact TS TECH to discuss the IT portion of your plan, or for information on our consulting partners who provide DRP services.

Do you know what your employees are
doing on the Internet?
By Brian Renter, President, Universal Information Systems

The importance of the Internet to the daily operation of businesses and organizations has increased significantly over the past few years. Most companies have one or more critical business functions that depend entirely on the speed and availability of their Internet connection. Ensuring a reliable and fast Internet connection has become an almost universal priority for companies.

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Contact TS TECH today to learn more about our internet monitoring and reporting services, Free to Managed IT customers!

There are multiple ways that you can convert your non-PDF documents (such as Word files and Excel spreadsheets) into PDFs.

Using Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010
If you have Microsoft Office 2010, you can easily save documents as PDFs in Word, Excel, and other programs by going to File > Save As > Adobe PDF. (In Office 2007, you an also look for the Acrobat tab on the ribbon and click Create PDF.) Simply save the PDF with the name and location you want it to have and the PDF will generate.

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Forget the research evidence, the dozens of pages of documentation and the years of prodding by communications consultants. Do your own survey right now. Pick up your telephone and call ten companies or businesses in your area that provide some sort of customer service, such as banks, brokerage firms, business equipment or insurance companies. Ask to speak to "a manager." If you get through, explain that you called to evaluate their telephone techniques. Then give the manager a brief report, hang up, and record your findings.

Chances are your research will prove that the most common errors you encounter in telephone answering are among the "dirty dozen." Here they are:

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And the
WINNER is. . . !

The WINNER of September's "Online Portal Challenge" is Lorna McMahon ! We will be sending you a $50 Visa Gift Card prize!

Don't forget, by using TS TECH's online portal and email system to create/track service tickets online, you not only receive a quick and efficient response, but you will be entered for a chance to win! Each month, we will hold a drawing of online portal users. To enter, just submit your service tickets via our Customer Portal at www.ts-tech.com.

Business
Continuity Tip

Storms Brewing

Hurricanes are one of nature's most powerful and destructive forces generating heavy rainfall, destructive winds, flooding and tornadoes. Hurricane Irene became the first hurricane of the 2011 Atlantic season as it moved over Puerto Rico early Monday morning. Irene is projected to strengthen over the next five days before reaching Florida and the Southeast U.S. between Thursday and Saturday.

With several storms brewing in the Atlantic, it is important to prepare now. Download the Hurricane Preparedness Checklist to help prepare your business, employees, and community.

An Ounce Of Prevention Is Worth A Pound Of Cure.

- Benjamin Franklin

Just for Laughs