Recent News

We are proponents of regular maintenance. We practice what we preach.

Virtual~Sands wants to help you maximize your ability to recovery essential assets that may be lost or stolen. Whether you leave your laptop in the airport, dropped your smart phone at the restaurant, or even forgot your passport in the hotel lobby, we can help maximize recovery with some preventive steps. Both with asset tagging (with finder reward) to Lojack for laptops, we can help.

Virtual~Sands has expanded managed services beyond off site backup. Adding the ability to rapidly deploy hosted applications we can now deliver critical business applications like: documentation management (both wiki and document storage), ERP, CRM, Cloud storage and synchronization, project management, and even on-line education portals.

Our main office now has continuous power provided by a natural gas generator. In our efforts to improve continuity of service, technology needs electric power. Although possible that natural gas service could be disrupted, it is far less likely than electrical power especially during New England ice storms and high winds with aerial power lines. Power switchover is automatically transferred and the 20 second gap is handled by battery uninterruptible power supplies.

We recently invested in an issue tracking system by Atlassian called JIRA. It is our hope that for web sites, web applications, desktop or server software, and media projects, that we can follow through on any issues that may arise. Software bugs can take many forms with variable severity thus changing priority. Released software always comes with critique and a wishlist from users. Tracking issues thoroughly also helps us work with the your people to manage change.

Being able to keep track of a hardware or software issue from start to finish helps us deliver better solutions. Recently, we added a trouble ticket system to do just that. For both outsourced IT at support.virtualsands.com and development at support.ender-design.com our goal is to not miss critical information and make sure the ball isn't dropped on either end. Your business day is hectic and it's easy to lose sight of a minor problem until you need to be in that meeting and then the...

When economic times are tough, it goes without saying that seeking value becomes a priority. One begins to ask the question is what I'm getting from my vendors good? Can I do better? Third party verification of skill, knowledge, and ability can provide some comfort that you are getting a good value. Brainbench offers such verification and I want you to be comfortable in working with Ender Design and know you are getting good value. Here are just a four (of 16) examples related to key...

In addition to the basic features of your site answering the Who, What, Where, and When of your visitors, this data is now displayed in a variety of tables and active graphical charts. Quick reports focusing on different aspects of the statistics designed for different audiences. Search Engine information with the ability to see how visitors find you, what sites they are coming from, and what keywords were used in their search. This latest version also provides the ability to set up search...

We have seen the rate of contamination increase sharply in the last few months. In addition to making sure machines are current in their protection software, there are some steps to take to help prevent problems.

- First, use Firefox or Chrome as your browser. There are fewer hooks into the operating system and thus less chance of severe damage. - Avoid clicking on ads. Some ads that look legitimate these days are actually offered up by bogus sponsors. They consume the ad space on...

Dell makes a good machine. Both desktop workstations and servers have been stable and reliable. With the economy in its present state we are finding our choice provider of hardware somewhat lacking. They are reducing parts inventory and drawing out their lead times. They have reduced personnel and thus made their response time slower... even for new purchases. We have seen similar trends with other vendors as well. In order to keep lead times shorter and quality of machines higher, we...