We’re huge fan’s of Google Apps at Digital Partners. One of the reasons is the ease of setup and deployment of the system itself but also the extensibility with the Google Apps Marketplace.
Here is a quick overview video of what it’s all about:
Yesterday a friend and long time partner referred us to a client who was in a bit of situation. I use them as an example here as their situation is a far to often occurrence. Long story short: for their relatively small two-site company the owner had a handful of IT firms, tech guys and random sub-contractors working on their IT. To many cooks in the kitchen creates a mess!
Cost is the first usual suspect for these type of situations. Firms with lower skilled staff or freelancers without overhead of a larger company can offer lower hourly costs which can be attractive to an uninformed client. They’ll have a freelancer or moonlighter come to work on their systems on evenings and weekends. Also we’ll tend to see the tween age relative of someone who works there. However with these lower skilled workers usually comes a lower breadth of skills, requiring them to have others (attempt to) fill in the blanks to complete the job.
Stemming from cost, competency (or lack there of) is the 2nd most common reason we see. For one of our niche markets, we find this most often in IT Service firms that don’t really support Mac’s, but they have someone they refer clients to, or subcontracts that out to another firm. This is usually where the afore-mentioned tween runs into trouble too. Working with firms that don’t meet your core needs will cost you more money due to the need to constantly bring in others to complete the job they don’t have on staff.
All that being said, there is nothing wrong with having multiple IT firms work for your business; just as long as they focus in different arenas. An analogy I often refer to is to the medial profession. You have a GP that is very well-trained in core medicine, but is not an expert in any one speciality, but knows enough to know when need to see someone with more focus. Then there are specialists that you work with on an as needed, case by case basis. When looking for an IT firm, find one that is a great GP, one you trust and is trusted by those you trust. They must look after the core technology of your business (servers, desktops, laptops, networks, printers, connectivity, communication, etc). Have them refer you to work with specialist they trust: Web-designers, SEO specialists, database developers, etc.. Have your GP set the strategy for your company and execute that with them and their partners. With to many GP’s in the exam room all they’re doing is stepping on each others toes and racking up your bill.
One of the most frequent IT issue I hear of is a about disaster recovery. It’s usually in the form of a story of how they or someone they know had an incident and lost all their data; everything. Either for personal or small business, the stories are always heart breaking and very likely you or someone you know has a story of their own.
Whenever talking on this subject to clients or a group, I like to use this visualization technique. Imagine walking up to your office tomorrow morning and seeing a flooded out building, smoldering ashes or broken windows and a ransacked office: What data could you not live without? I ask them to write it down (better for me than the Insurance company) and to get a plan in place to protect it.
Fire, flood and theft are leading causes of permanent data loss. Following those are physical failure and human error; remember all those laptop left in a taxi stories? As a reseller for Hard Drive Disaster recovery services from Drive Savers, the best in the business in our opinion, even their economy plans carry a hefty price tag. What is the value of your data?
The worst part of nearly all these stories is that the solutions to protect from all this loss only costs a fractions of pennies to what the loss value is, even if you can put a price on it. However, cost usually is not the limiting factor in setting these systems up. Most users, even home users, value their data a lot more than the ~$30 price range for most of these systems. Usually we’ve found in these cases the complexity of these solutions being the most daunting factor. Inhibiting people not to set these up, or worse, setting them up wrong.
Mozy, one of our preferred solutions for backup just announced Mozy for Windows 2.0, a HUGE release that addresses improves so many stress points for users:
Faster and easier; the way upgrades should be. I was also told that Mac users will have to wait till later this year but it is coming down the pipe.
Check MozyPro out for yourself, and for the rest of June you can enter promo code JUNE for a 10% discount.
I was asked an interesting question today: “What is the best type of Internet connection?” Yes, you are reading the blog of an IT company, so interesting is a relative term here. Which is exactly my point. ”Best” is also a relative term, but all to often people ask us for the “best” solution, but fail to define what “best” is for them.
To which I replied… “what to you mean by best?”… her response was a blank stare… (crickets) …followed by… “….well… what do you have?” This was going nowhere fast…
What is “best” to me, my home or my company can be very different from what is “best” for you. Therefore, the “best” type of Internet connection (or anything for that matter) is usually is one that meets all your unique needs at the lowest cost. For example:
To find the “best” type of Internet connection you must first know your needs related to cost. For Internet service they are usually cost, accessibility, access, support, bandwidth and usage. Once you know that, finding what is your best is much easier.
“Time Machine for Windows” is what I’m sure Genie-Soft would love to call their backup software, Timeline (in both Home & Professional flavors) if it wasn’t for those pesky Apple lawyers or a huge royalty payout. Genie-soft may not be able to, but after using this software for some clients running Windows, that’s basically what it is. We’re very happy Windows users can now enjoy many of the benefits Mac users have enjoyed for years.
With so much of our personal and business data on our systems it’s no surprise that in the area of 45% of all systems lose unrecoverable data each year to some form of data loss. That is a lot of vacation photos, financial documents and wedding videos. Time Machine is focused toward the consumer and SoHo market and it’s been a HUGE asset to many Mac users having a super simple and automatic backup solution built-in as part of the Mac OS for nearly 3 years now (it has saved yours truly twice). Just like Time Machine, Timeline is drop dead simple setup with nearly zero maintenance, it passes the test for even the most luddite of computer users. Added to the local backup, they have the pending release of their online backup that makes this tool a true disaster recovery platform with offsite hosting of your backup.
For those of you Mac users with a Windows system still lingering around the home or office, I highly recommend Timeline as a very familiar cousin to what you already enjoy on your Mac.
I feel truly blessed to have developed relationships with our clients where we can have a direct effect on their businesses. In advising our clients, working hand-in-hand with the owner and leadership of the company to help match the clients business strategy with the proper technology to achieve those goals; this is our Advising services. It’s great to see the results when a properly developed and implemented plan come together and play out of over a multi-year period. The dividends are paid in terms of increased productivity, reduction of costs, happier employees and clients.
Entrepreneurs are a stubborn group, myself included. Busy people with power can adopt what I call a “ready, fire, aim” approach to project planning and implementation. It happens on a nearly continual basis, that owners with the best of intentions ask us to implement a solution they’ve developed. ”Here is what I think what we need, send me a quote to get is done yesterday”. Unfortunately all to often, as they are not IT Consultants, their picture of the technology available to solve a problem is at best a few years behind the time. I had one business owner just two years back suggest we implement a floppy disk backup system he had in the closet because he “still worked and didn’t want it to go to waste.” … not everyone can be helped.
I stress to our new clients (and often remind our existing) that we have a process in place for a reason and it’s important we stick to it because it works! Technology is a foundational part of most businesses, developing an understanding of our clients business to implement these mission critical systems is important to getting it done right the first time. And it’s always easier (and cheaper) to do things once.
We’ve received a number of calls in the past few weeks from both new and existing clients looking to get more organized in the New Year.
One of the most recommended type of systems we advise our clients to adopt are called CRM or Customer Relationship Management systems. They go beyond an address book list of who; by adding context of what, where and when. They can also help you track what’s next and who needs to do that. CRM systems help people take the sticky notes off the wall and bring everything together for everyone to see. How much time do you spend a day tracking all that down?
A technology trend we are huge advocates of is for companies to adopt software that is hosted on the Internet. You may hear people refer to these as SaaS or Web Applications. They allow for powerful software to be easily accessed by anyone, anywhere just by going to a website. Since we focus on the small business market; allowing our clients to gain access to powerful software with little upfront costs is a great win for our clients.
A popular CRM software you likely have heard of is Salesforce.com. They make powerful software that is very popular in the Enterprise market for providing a CRM solution to clients who want the quick implementation and other benefits of hosted software. As great as their offerings I was reminded today by our friends at DBPro’s that one size does not fit all. If found Salesforce.com to be to expensive for small business; charging for pretty much any user and any devices to access your data. I’ve also found the extendability of their services to also come with additional costs for both access and implementation. In our experience Salesforce.com is just to cost prohibitive for small business customers.
We are advocates of systems that are very lightweight: easy to setup, easy to learn, easy to use and affordable! A great hosted CRM which we’ve been advocates of for years is called Highrise by a company called 37Signals. They offer their hosted software on a per-company flat rate, there also are inexpensive partner products, services and iPhone Apps that work with their fantastic service. I encourage all small business to give them a try. You can signed up for a 30-day trial by clicking on this link or the banner to the right.
When speaking to business about Google Apps one of our most asked questions is what’s the difference between the standard edition and the Premier edition. This presentation gives a brief overview of Google Apps and expands on the key features of Google Apps Premier edition. For decision makers interested in Google Apps this is a must watch.
After watching if you have any additional questions we’d be happy to discuss with them. You can email us here.
Earlier today I spoke on the topic of “How to keep your business in-sync.” at the Apple Store in Menlo Park, NJ. Synchronization for email, contacts and calendar items is one of the most requested topics for both new and existing clients. It a pleasure to share some knowledge with the many in attendance at the monthly Business Networking session the store hosts; they always host a great crowd.
The event was co-sponsored by Apple and Kerio so naturally their solutions were the topic of discussion for the day. As many home users are familiar with MobileMe is a great solution for syncing your Mac’s and iPhone with practically all your data. We’ve found MobileMe to be a great solution for personal use and for families. I’ve also seen business make great use of the collaborative features as well.
For businesses in need of a robust server solution for communication and collaboration I’ve found the solution from Kerio in their Mail Server to take the needs of businesses to the next level. We’ve recommended Kerio Mail Server to clients for over 2 years now because of the great value it provides to our clients; enterprise features at a value price. I’ve included our Kerio Apple Store Presentation that outlines Kerio as a small business solution in greater detail.
Get Sync’d has been our hosting partner of choice in delivering the power of Kerio with the reliability, support and value price that is perfect for our small business clients.
Continuing our series of how to save money on IT in (any) economy is Part 2: Plan, then purchase.
It’s cheaper to purchase things only once. That’s a pretty self-evident statement if I’ve ever written one. However, you’d be surprised the amount of waste that clogs up an IT budget in the form of unplanned or unneeded purchases. I like to refer to this as “buying” when you should be “investing”. I’ve view it from this paradigm: You buy costs; they are expenses like office supplies or postage. You invest in assets; they can be in many forms but they must either allow your business to earn more income or reduce costs. Technology in business must be viewed as an investment. The net effect of either making more or spending less will result is your company being more profitable.
They key to it all is with the plan. When financial planners meet with new clients they analyze their situation, develop a unique plan based upon their clients goals and then implements that plan over time. When you start with the end in mind you can build upon a solid foundation of right fitting technologies, ones that complement your business goals. The person behind this plan is your IT architect, like an Executive Consultant from DP. This is the person responsible for working in conjunction with your management team will develop a technology plan to accomplish your business objectives. Sure, it may “cost” more to hire an advisor to chart this out early on, but it’s far less costly than retooling during heavy growth or the missed opportunities of using a poorly selected system. Does your IT plan support your business plan?
