Archived news 2002

(440) 285-5433      (440) 632-6320      1-888-338-4564

12/10/02 8:30AM - Sales update

We will be having limited office hours during the upcoming Christmas Season.

Tuesday, Dec. 24 - 8:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Wednesday, Dec. 25 (Christmas Day) - CLOSED

Thursday, Dec. 26 - 1:00PM - 6:00PM

Tuesday, Dec. 31 - 8:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Wednesday, Jan. 1 (New Years Day) - CLOSED

Thursday, Jan. 2 - 1:00PM - 6:00PM

We wish you and your family an enjoyable and safe Christmas Season.

Simcon Introduces DSL LITE.

An introductory DSL service priced at $14.95 per month plus Alltel's Digital service loop of $21.95. That's a total of $36.90 per month. DSL LITE provided all the benefits of DSL at a lower price!!!

We will be having limited office hours during the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

Thursday, Nov. 28 (Thanksgiving Day) - CLOSED

Friday, Nov. 29 - 10:00AM - 2:00PM

Saturday, Nov. 30 - 10:00AM - 2:00PM

We wish you and your family an enjoyable and safe Thanksgiving weekend.

See us at the Geauga County Fair!! We will be staffing a booth once again at the Geauga County Fair in Merchant Hall #1 (beside the Grandstand). Be sure and stop by and say "hello". Please have an enjoyable and safe Labor Day weekend.

Click here for Geauga County Fair website

Also we  have updated the "finished"  pictures of our NEW office (see pictures).

We are done!! We are now operating fully out of our NEW facility at the Bank One Building on Chardon Square. As of 4:00 AM all services were back up and running. We wish to thank all of you for your support and cooperation during this time. We would also like to extend in invitation to you to stop by and see our new offices. We hope to have pictures on the web site soon. 

Below is a copy of the email sent to all customers this week about the office relocation:

To Our Valued Customers, 

We are pleased to announce that effective Aug. 12, we will
begin operations at our NEW office location. Our new office
space is at the Bank One Building located on Chardon
Square. We will be located on the 3rd floor (accessible by
2 elevators) of the west wing. This new facility will
include over 4,000 sq. ft. to house our new office space
and Network Operations Center.

We are very proud to have this new office space and the
exciting possibilities it will provide for us to expand
our existing business. This facility will also include
room for a Training Center and we hope to begin classes
this fall. Please be sure and check out the Customer News
section on our website (www.simcon.net) for updates and
pictures.

Please remember that we currently plan on moving servers on
Saturday, August 10 from 10:00 PM until Sunday, August 11
at 4:00 AM. We have plans to make this move as quickly and
smoothly as possible. We do expect that there will be
minimal disruption to services during this process but ask
that you remember that services could be down during this
middle of the night timeframe.

During the server move we will update our telephone voice
announcement hourly to keep you posted of the progress. 
You may call in to our phone number (285-5433 or 632-6320)
to hear these announcements. We will also have Technical
Support available on Sunday, August 11 from 9:00 AM until
4:00 PM. Thank you for your anticipated cooperation and
support in this matter.


All of us at Simply Connect

We did encounter an outage in our Middlefield connections from approximately 11:30 PM Sunday evening until 10:30AM on Monday morning. Severe lighting strikes impacted both phone lines and equipment. Service has been restored and we apologize for any inconvenience. 

On Monday, July 22 fiber optic lines were run to our NEW location. The fiber lines were run underground to the Bank One building. We have pictures of the installation as viewed from the north side of the Chardon Square showing the contractors installing the large roll of fiber optic cable. We are continuing to make progress on the office remodeling as well. Our new Network Operations Center and Lobby will truly be unique. Be sure and check out the pictures as we make progress on our NEW location. 

The NEW office remodeling project is currently on schedule. We are still on a plan to open the NEW office for business on Monday, August 12. Please remember that we currently plan on moving servers on Saturday, August 10 from 10:00 PM until Sunday, August 11 at 4:00 AM. We have plans to make this move as quickly and smoothly as possible. We do expect that there will be minimal disruption to services during this process but ask that you remember that services could be down during this middle of the night timeframe.

The office will be closed on Friday, July 5 but we will be monitoring voice mail that day. We do have plans to begin office remodeling at our NEW location (see below) that day and during the weekend. Please have an enjoyable and safe 4rth of July holiday.

Exciting News - New office location (see pictures)

We are pleased to announce that effective Aug. 12, we will begin operations at our NEW office location. This week we have finalized arrangements for our new office space at the Bank One Building located on Chardon Square. We will be located on the 3rd floor (accessible by 2 elevators) of the west wing. This new facility will include over 4,000 sq. ft. to house our new office space and Network Operations Center.

We will begin office remodeling and building preparations for our new fiber optic connectivity as soon as next week. We are very proud to have this new office space and the exciting possibilities it will provide for us to expand our existing business. This facility will also include room for a Training Center and we hope to begin classes this fall.

We want to also make our customers aware that during the weekend of August 10 & 11 we will be moving our Network Operations Center. We have plans to make this move as quickly and smoothly as possible. We do expect that there will be minimal disruption to services during this process. We currently plan on moving servers on Saturday, August 10 from 10:00 PM until Sunday, August 11 at 4:00 AM.

We have installed a NEW phone system this morning to provide for improved Customer Service. This new phone system will help us target incoming phone calls to the appropriate personnel and allow for a more efficient response time to customer inquiries. You will notice a menu selection when you first call in:

  # 1 - Billing 

  # 2 - Sales

  # 3 - Technical Support

  # 0 - General Inquiries

We hope you find this new phone system beneficial as we seek to constantly improve our Customer Service.

We will be temporarily ending our Saturday hours effective this Memorial Day weekend (5/25) until Labor Day weekend. Summer has traditionally been a slow time of the year for us. This summer we also have quite a bit of work planned especially  if we proceed with an office relocation. We would estimate an office relocation to occur in August. We are also making tentative plans for our display booth at the Geauga County Fair this coming August. Please have an enjoyable and safe Memorial Day holiday.

Added a Customer News page to our website. Link is located in the upper left navigation bar of our Home Page. 

Our Web Email (IceWarp) feature is by far one of our most used services. This service is currently running on one of our most powerful computers (dual Pentium chips, dual RAID hard drives) and still is performing below our satisfaction. We have been communicating with the software author to try and help resolve this issue. 

One of the issues is that each time a customer requests email from Web Email, it must first download from our main Mail Server, then download to the Web Email Server, and then be displayed to the customer. This all takes a significant amount of time depending on how much active email the customer may have. All Inbox, Sent Items, Trash, and each individual Folder must be transferred each time. 

Many customers use Web Email to continue to store large file attachments (pictures mainly) in their mailboxes rather than make a copy and store to their local hard drive. If the file attachment were to be copied to the customer local hard drive, then this file attachment could be effectively DELETED from the mailbox thus reducing the amount of time it takes to download their mailbox each time. Also keeping mail stored in each Inbox, Sent Items, Trash, an individual Folders cleaned out by DELETING old items would be helpful.

Another option would be to consider using Outlook Express for handling email This software is freely installed in all Window PC's. When using Outlook Express the email is automatically downloaded "directly" from our main Mail Server to the customer PC. This avoids the transfer of email each time and obviously would make the process happen more quickly. Instructions for setting up Outlook Express can be found on our FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page at :  Installing Outlook Express

We are currently evaluating an office relocation. We are outgrowing our current facility and also realize that our current location is not convenient to our customers located all across Geauga County as well as those in Lake and Ashtabula counties. We are committed to staying located in Geauga County.

Included in this office relocation would be the consideration of  going to fiber optic connectivity as well as expanding our NOC (Network Operations Center) services. We would then consider offering expanded business services to include a "secure, 24/7, redundant" server co-location facility. We are also considering a facility large enough for us to have a Training Center to conduct classes and have a Video conferencing center. We will keep you posted on the progress of this project.