I have seen too many small and even more medium sized organizations that do not have a centralized IT infrastructure and even worse have no written IT policy or operations manual. Consequently there is no coordination between departments and no continuity necessary to accommodate employee turnover. I have seen this lead to some truly undesirable consequences.

There was an organization I worked for that had an ISP that provided their Internet connection and assigned IP addresses. They had an IT department that is in charge of the internal network and manage the Exchange server for company email, file servers and provided support for users. They outsourced their web site hosting to another company. Each department managed their area of the web site via MS FrontPage to conserve cost. Each department that worked on the site would sort of 'assume'  they were responsible for the entire site which lead to a whole myriad of problems.

These are some of the consequences that were directly related to this lack of organization and centralization in just one company: More...

CIRA has informed us that they will be sending an informational email about the changes to the Administrative contact for all .ca domain names on May 6th, 2008. You can read more about the specifics of the new CIRA WHOIS Policy at CIRA's web site - http://www.cira.ca/en/Whois/whois_intro.html

Points of note:

• Effective June 10th, 2008, the .ca public WHOIS will no longer provide personal information for individual domain name registrants.
• Registrant information for domains registered to corporations will still be provided.

This will be a welcome change and will help to prevent unscrupulous companies from using whois information to perpetrate domain hijacking and other scams on domain owners.

We are excited to announce that we will be upgrading our email server to the new release of SmarterMail 5.1, currently in beta testing, as soon as the manufacturer releases it to market.

SmarterMail 5.x builds upon a solid reputation of stability, performance, and value by adding hundreds of new features and enhancements—solidifying its position as the cost-effective alternative to Microsoft Exchange™ for businesses.

Synchronization of calendar, contacts, and tasks is available from Outlook™, Windows Mobile devices, PocketPCs, and Smartphones (e.g. Motorola Q™, Palm Treo™, Samsung BlackJack™). All users can access the complete set of email and collaboration tools from an industry-leading Web Interface that supports all major internet browsers.

Security features have been enhanced with 99% antispam protection along with standard antivirus, intrusion detection, and attack prevention. SmarterMail 5.x has integrated the Yahoo! DomainKeys authentication standard and is compliant with regulatory requirements for email archiving (Sarbanes-Oxley)1 in SmarterMail 5.x.

We are eagerly awaiting the upcoming release of version 5.1 and all of the new features it will afford our clients.

Here are a list of some of the features I especially am looking forward to: More...

One of the most frequent mistakes made by novice web designers is putting huge images on their web pages—images that are too large and take too long to download. Images need to be optimized for quick loading and proper style proportions before putting them on web pages. There is a delicate balance that needs to be achieved between file size and picture quality as the majority of load time for a web page comes from the images.

There are three areas where bytes can be shaved off your images: bit depth (the number of colors), resolution (the density or number of pixels per inch the image contains), and the dimension (the actual length and width of the image).

The actual dimensions, or size, of your image is the easiest to achieve, but avoid just setting the dimensions for the image in your web authoring program. You need to resize your image to the proper dimensions before inserting it in your web page; otherwise your image will appear smaller, but in fact the entire large image is still being downloaded. The dimensions are being restricted, but the size of the image being downloaded has not changed.

The resolution and bit depth are a bit trickier, but fortunately there are various tools to aid you in accomplishing this. One of the best is Adobe Photo Shop, though this solution is pricy and has a relatively steep learning curve; it is best left to professional web developers and graphic artists.

One of the best and easiest to use image optimizer programs for novice web masters is available free from Bluefive Software and can be downloaded here. Try it out; I’m sure you’ll like it. You can even use it to optimize your images before you send them in your emails—your friends will thank you.