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Rees Roberts
Rees Roberts
President and CEO
IS Works, Inc.
As President and CEO of IS Works, Rees is responsible for providing IS-related solutions and services to small and medium-sized businesses. As senior systems designer for the company, Rees researches, develops, oversees and implements client solutions. Rees currently holds various certifications from manufacturers such as Cisco and Symantec.
DOCUMENTATION! It’s IMPORTANT!
Let’s be frank, on a good day, documentation sucks! But it is the key to saving you large amounts of money via support costs in the long run. Any “mature” IT company or IT worker will have this down, albeit begrudgingly. As a business owner, I insist on documentation and yes, I struggle with getting it done as well. If I didn’t have a central place for all of network information, passwords, etc. I would go NUTS! Luckily we have a fantastic application for our support and documentation. With just a few clicks I can bring up a client, see all of their network information and any notes and proceed with whatever issue needs resolution. By the way, we can get to that anywhere we have connection to the internet!
Let me relate a couple of stories as to why documentation is so important. I was recently asked to migrate a company to a new service. They have no IT staff and the IT guy left long ago. I showed up ready to take on the world and asked for the login information for the services I was changing. After a bit of wondering we determined that we didn’t have it. I returned two different occasions only to be met with the same challenges of missing configuration information or passwords. A few hour job turned into 6.
Item number two, a company waits until the last day to renew their SSL certificate…. Nightmare ensues. After struggling with trying to get login information that we needed we were finally able to get what we needed to get the certificate done, at 2:45 AM, we started at 10:30 PM. A little documentation and getting it done before the last day would have helped.
Now the good news is, for these two companies I now have all of the information I need. For all of our other clients we have all of their documentation on hand, including old passwords, and we can spit those out any time we need to for our clients. Additionally, we create a repository somewhere on THEIR network so they always have it. Documentation is not something that a service provider should hold hostage. If yours does, RUN from them as fast as you can.
I can hear you now… “Rees, it sounds like you are whining and crying a little bit.” Maybe a little…. However, what I can tell you is this, you have to question WHY your IT provider doesn’t have that information at hand and why you don’t have a copy. As a managed service provider, gathering ALL of your information and going over it with you is our first priority. Oh, and by the way, it doesn’t cost you anything extra.
In the end, proper documentation can mean the difference between making sure your services are up and running quickly, or ending up with a major headache and a large invoice at the end of a job.
Making Strides against Cancer
IS Works Walks the Walk!
We are proud to announce that we are teaming up to fight Breast Cancer by forming a Team for the 2010 Making Strides Against Breast Cancer.
The Making Strides event is not a race; it is a celebration of survivorship, an occasion to express hope, and a shared goal to end a disease that threatens the lives of so many people we love. Making Strides is more than just a walk it is a fundraising event for the American Cancer Society and we need your help!
Our goal is to raise $5,000.00 and we only have a short time to do it.
I have seen firsthand how devastating breast cancer is, to the person who has it and those who love them. My wife’s best friend, Sonnya, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004 and has been cancer free since 2005. Although she is a cancer survivor, there is always a worry that she could get it again.To bring this one step closer to my family, my wife's step mother was just diagnosed with advanced breast cancer.
Cancer does not discriminate and if there is anything that we can do to have it not affect someone we love, then a small donation is a giant step.
We are asking you to please support this effort by donating money towards our Team. Donate by visiting our Team page at the 2010 Making Strides web page http://main.acsevents.org/goto/isworks
Our Donor Levels (and their Prizes) are:
Any amount helps to reach our goal, so no donation is too small.
We believe that by participating, IS Works and you will help to create a world without breast cancer. Come and support IS Works’ Team!
Sincerely,
Rees Roberts
CEO, IS Works, Inc.
Firefox....give me back some of my RAM!
When Firefox first hit the scene there were so many reasons to love it!
It was FREE, fast and lots of plug-ins for it. As of late, it's gotten to be quite the RAM hog and ends up slowing your computer down.
So let me give you a few tips to take back some of that speed that you once had!
First things first, sometimes you just need to close it and reopen it....sometimes it's just that easy.
That doesn't work all the time, so what we're going to do it tweak the settings so that it uses less RAM.
1. Open Firefox and type in about:config in the address bar.
2. Type browser.cache.memory.enable in the Filter Bar and make sure it is enabled. If not, just double click it to set it to enable.
3. Right-click an area of empty space in the browser and choose New > Integer. Type in browser.cache.memory.capacity and click OK.
The integer value you enter depends on the amount of RAM you have.
If you have:
256 MB of RAM, enter “4096”
512 MB of RAM, enter “8192”
1 GB of RAM, enter “16384”
and so forth… Just double the number as your RAM doubles.
(I use 8192 even though I have far more RAM than that.)
4. Right-click anywhere on the window and click New > Bootlean and enter:
config.trim_on_minimize
And set it to true. When you minimize an application in Windows Vista, the memory usage is supposed to go down but Firefox doesn’t do this. By setting this to true, Firefox will begin to use less memory when minimized.
5. Restart Firefox for these changes to apply.
Microsoft dumps Response Point SMB "VoIP" system.
Microsoft has officially dumped Response Point, their Small Business voice over IP system.
The announcement can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/responsepoint/notification.aspx
Our Website redesign
Hello and welcome to our newly designed website. This has been an ongoing project and continues to be so. A special thanks to our team member Zach O'Claire for all of his hard work.
Over the next few weeks we will continue to add valuable content to our site to keep you up to date on all of our services and growing partnerships.
A couple of pieces that we are working to put together is a section of free tools for anyone to use as well as the ability to sign up online for any of our tech alerts or newsletters right from our website.
For those of you on our manged services plans, you are already rest knowing that we have all of your alerts covered!
Additionally you will see other team profiles added to the Our Company section as I can get the team to complete their profiles. Thankfully they are working hard supporting our valued customers, so I won't hold it against them if you don't!
About Rees
Rees Roberts
President and CEO
IS Works, Inc.
Rees Roberts is an enthusiastic, high-energy technology buff. There is little he enjoys more than tinkering with machines and discovering exactly what he can make them do, and he has spent more than twelve years doing just that.
As President and CEO of IS Works, Rees is responsible for providing IS-related solutions and services to small and medium-sized businesses. As senior systems designer for the company, Rees researches, develops, oversees and implements client solutions. Rees currently holds various certifications from manufacturers such as Cisco and Symantec.
Prior to joining IS Works, Rees spent two and a half years consulting for GetThere, a leading online travel technology provider with 486 employee’s world wide. While working at GetThere, Rees created and maintained an operating system platform that dramatically reduced the number of help desk tickets created. He was also responsible for hardware standards and upgrades for an international workforce. In addition, Rees was successful in defending the company’s network from the numerous virus attacks that plagued many companies around the world.
Prior to working for GetThere, Rees consulted for a variety of corporations, such as The Gap, Franklin Tempelton Investments, Exodus Communications, ArthroCare, and ILogistix. His responsibilities ranged from domain administration to enterprise-wide rollouts of desktop platforms.
Before his career as an IT consultant, Rees spent several years as a tour manager and sound engineer for international jazz superstars and popular rock bands such as Stanley Jordan, Smashmouth and Papa Roach. Although this was a very exciting career, Rees’ interest in technology has brought him where he is today. Being completely self taught in technology, Rees’ excellence in his field is driven by his desire to make things work. Due to his tenacity, whether or not he knows the solution readily, Rees will find a way to make it happen.
Rees lives in San Jose, CA with his wife and two son’s ages 12 and 2. He enjoys activities such as sports, reading, BBQ and, of course, tinkering.
Our Company
IS Works is located in the heart of the Silicon Valley and has been serving small and medium sized businesses since 1998.
We're located at:
2975 Bowers Ave Ste.219
Santa Clara, Ca 95051
408-213-6800