7. Word: Select a Vertical Section of Text - you may not use this often, but it is really cool when you need it. Take a look just to see!

8. Resend an email - you can always forward an email, but resending it makes it look as if it were being sent for the first time. This is handy when you want to send the exact same email to a different recipient.

Thanks to our clients, partners and friends who were able to stop by last Thursday! Congratulations to Laurel Penhale of the American Advertising Federation and her family for winning the Kinect!

We do have some discount coupons left over - 10% off anything in the store between now and January 31. Let us know if you can use one!

BEI will be closed on Monday, December 26 and Monday, January 2. As always, if our clients need to reach us on those days (or anytime outside of business hours) they should call and leave a message on x 211 (you will be instructed to do this) that will be returned promptly by the engineer who is on emergency duty. We wish all of our clients, partners and friends a very happy holiday and a healthy and happy 2012.

Each year during the holiday season we express our gratitude by supporting some of our favorite local causes.

The Edward C. Mazique Parent Child Center is a wonderful child development facility that provides child care, early child-hood education, family counseling, and many other services to the Washington D.C. Shaw/Cardoza community. They have been a client of BEI for many years now and do wonderful work. Each year we support their "Help Save Our Season Christmas Toy Drive", purchasing toys and clothing for a class at the Center.

This year we also supported Our Neighbor’s Child (ONC), a non-profit, community-based organization, which started in 1992 by providing holiday gifts for children in low income families in western Fairfax County.

Thanks to all who supported "Movember" - supporting a 'stache and helping to change the face of men's health. During November each year, Movember is responsible for the sprouting of moustaches on thousands of men’s faces, in the US and around the world. With their Mo’s, these men raise vital funds and awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men. The Sarsaparilla Staches, captained by BEI Network Engineer Joe Mettler, raised over $2,000!

Joe, Jake and Mike with their "Movember" moustaches

We'd like to welcome two new engineers to our staff.

Ryan McDonnell joined us in October and is spending time both at our client's offices and at BEI taking calls on the Help Desk. Ryan joined BEI from District Computers and has a broad background in everything IT. Ryan and his wife have a two year-old son named Hunter and a dog named Sam. He played football in college at UVa Wise, and in his "spare" time likes to golf, ski and fish.

Helga Ishikawa Berry started at BEI just last week and is coming up to speed very quickly. Helga will be focused on supporting our Help Desk. She joined BEI from the Mitre Corporation where she supported users from around the world using a wide variety of technologies. Helga describes herself as "The girl with the German first name and Japanese last name who grew up in Peru speaking Spanish." She has a puppy that she and her husband adopted last spring - it is named Raven but she does offer the disclaimer that her husband is a Redskins fan! A self-proclaimed coffee and chocolate head Helga is helping us consume some of the vast quantities of chocolate that appear at this time of year. She offers this Japanese lesson for the day:

Ishi – stone, kawa – river.. Ishikawa means Stone of the river.

Microsoft has several programs in place to encourage you to make your Office 365 purchase before the end of 2011 (all expire on 12/31/2011):

Big Easy- this gives you subsidy dollars that you can use to pay for migration assistance, Microsoft products or additional BEI Services. The dollars can be substantial - click here for details.

Migration Wiz - if you are migrating from another cloud email system or another instance where Migration Wiz can be of assistance BEI can help with terrific discounts.