Happy Thanksgiving!

This Thanksgiving, we're thankful for family, friends, and all of our wonderful clients and QuickTips subscribers. We owe you a debt of gratitude for your continual feedback, support, and the many ways you help us to be a better business. Every day we're inspired by the example you set. Small businesses are the backbone of America, and though the year ahead may be challenging for many, we hope it will be fruitful for all. Thanks again for making us your IT partner, and keep your suggestions and comments coming!

If you're looking for ways to say "thank you" to your community this Thanksgiving, Meals on Wheels and Feeding America are two great national organizations to contact. Or you can get in touch with local soup kitchens, religious organizations, homeless shelters, and food banks for other volunteer opportunities. Volunteering on Thanksgiving Day is a wonderful way to get involved – and it only takes a couple hours to deliver meals to seniors or feed hungry families, so you have the rest of the day to spend with your own family

Alert: Fraudulent Email Is Not From Intuit

A number of fraudulent emails have gone out recently purporting to be from Intuit. The latest one claims to be from the QuickBooks Update Center and contains the subject line "Intuit Secure Update.” This email is not legitimate. Ignore it and delete it.

For reference, the text of the fraudulent email is as follows: 

rom: QuickBooks Update Center [mailto:software@quickbooks.intuit.com]

Subject: Intuit Secure Update

 

As is the case with many companies that maintain large databases of information, Intuit is the target of fraudulent attempts to get access and extract information from its database. We recently watch our database was illegally accessed and certain contact and account information were taken, including QuickBooks email addresses, names, phone numbers. The data accessed does not include banking information.

 

Immediately upon learning about this, Intuit started an investigation and took corrective steps. It is important to know the company continually monitors for any illicit use of information in our database, and so far, we have not detected the misuse of this information.

 

In order to help assure the security of your information, we have developed a special plug-in for browser and Windows® - QuickBooks Update. This software will protect yours private information from any kinds of spyware or malware.

 

System requirements :

 

    * Windows XP, Vista, 2000, 2003

    * Internet Explorer 6.x, 7.x, 8.x

 

ATTENTION: You will not be able to use our service without update from 17 of November 2009

 

Download :

 

    * Windows® QuickBooks Update

    * Internet Explorer plug-in

 

If you are not Microsoft Windows® user you can use our services as usual

 

Intuit has confirmed that this is a fraudulent email (for more details, see the Intuit security blog at http://security.intuit.com/alerts/alert.php?a=8). But even without their confirmation, it’s pretty easy to tell. Here's how:

 

1. You can often spot a phishing attempt because it contains misspellings or poor grammar. In the above example, a phrase like “We recently watch our database was illegally accessed” is a big red flag that the email was probably written by a scammer whose first language isn’t English.

2. Any email that requests personal information or asks you to download something is probably a phishing attempt. Legitimate companies do not ask their clients to re-supply information the company already possesses. Nor do they ask their clients to download plug-ins by clicking on an email link.

 

If you receive a phishing email, do not click on any of the links or consent to download anything. Forward a copy of the email to your IT administrator so that they’re aware of the problem and can alert other users. Then delete the email from your inbox and trash bin.

more info - http://cmitsolutions.com/centralsv

Give Your Documents a Uniform Look with Themes

A nice feature of Office 2007 is that you can make documents from several different programs – Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook – all have the same look and feel. Whereas in the past you’d have to alter the color and style of every table, chart, and shape in every document separately, you can now just select a theme that takes care of all those details automatically.

For example, here’s a simple chart using the theme called Office:







Here’s that same chart using the theme called Perspective:







As you can see, the theme affects the font, color, shading, and shadow effects. And because it’s available in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, your chart will look the same no matter what program it appears in – and all the other charts you use will have a similar look.

The Themes gallery is accessible from the Formatting Palette. To create your own custom theme, you can open up a given theme and then alter the font, colors, and effects, and then save as a new theme. Just use the customization settings to the right of the thumbnailed themes, visible in the screen shot below.


more info - http://cmitsolutions.com/centralsv