Voicemail on steroids-Phonetag

Do you ever have the problem where you get a voicemail in a setting that makes it impossible to respond immediately? You know the situation. You're in the marathon quarterly marketing meeting for 6 hours with no breaks, and to put the phone to your ear would be frowned upon.

What to do? Get Phonetag. What Phonetag does is take those pesky audio based voicemails and transcribe them into text that gets emailed to you. You can hold the phone below the table and read your voicemail and then respond via email!

The phonetag email also has an attached wav file that you can listen to later. Man that sounds cool, but cool means expensive right? Wrong. Phonetag is only $30/month. This tool saves a huge amount of time and you'll get the $30 back the first week of every month. Happy voicemailing.

Here's a link with a free 30 day offer. https://apps.simulscribe.com/signup/r/305825

5623438756@messaging.cbeyond.net

iPads continue dominance-can they be used for everything?

Recently one of our clients asked us why his laptop didn't work as well at his iPad. Ok he didn't say it that nice, but that was the intent. And while we've had iPads from the beginning, it gave us pause to think about using an iPad for everything.

So for the last 2 weeks we've been working from our iPads for all that we can and this is what we've learned. They can do the normal business stuff better than any laptop-email, calendar, notes, spreadsheets, presentations, remote access, not to mention individual apps for almost anything you want to do.

With the instant on feature (try that on your laptop), they sure make work faster and with almost no crashing, a lot less frustrating.

I use mine for everything other than accessing proprietary business applications, only because my vendor doesn't (won't) make an iPad app. Sure I can use the web to access those apps, but on the iPad my user experience is less than optimum.

I will continue to use it as much as I can and report back on my continued observations. Bottom line is if you need basic computer functions and nothing crazy and can handle the smaller screen, the iPad with the Apple bluetooth keyboard is the better bet....TH

Microsoft moving to outsourced IT model

Microsoft recently announced that it has forged a deal with Infosys Technologies to manage all of its IT operations.  This is a tremendous confirmation for the effectiveness of the outsourced IT model.

A large, well known, technology company like Microsoft would only make a shift like this if it made sense for their business.  Per a Microsoft rep:

As you know, we have had a concentrated effort to be more efficient and save money. This was a major area where we could do this.

There a clear method to managing technology.  IT workers are no longer a bunch of cowboys riding around the countryside saving PCs in distress.  There is a theory, technique, and workflow to managing IT for business.  

When you have a team of technicians that manage multiple IT departments they gain a level of experience and unique breadth of knowledge.  And they are motivated and incentivized to leverage those benefits across all their customers.

Infosys makes this point themselves when they refer to their deal with Microsoft as

..a unique opportunity to partner with Microsoft IT and gain deep and early expertise in the implementation and management of the latest Microsoft technologies, and thus enhancing Infosys capabilities to help other customers leverage Microsoft’s innovation and adopt these technologies...

Done right it can help you save money, be more effective, and keep your technology on top.  

squeak or scream?

When I tell people what I do, they invariably respond...I get it you fix computers. Nothing could be further from the truth. While we do, in the course of a normal day, 'fix' peoples computers (which encompasses servers, desktops, laptops, network equipment, etc.) our real purpose is to NOT have to fix them, ever. The more you have to 'fix' your computers the more it costs, in lost time for yourself/employees, customer service, paying someone to fix it....and the list goes on. What we do is use our monitoring software (a hybrid of Kaseya, and our own monitoring systems) to watch every piece of hardware and software on our client's networks. If at anytime (days, nights, weekends) those systems have an issue-what we call a 'squeak' either our monitoring software automatically fixes the 'squeak' on it's own, or the 'squeak' gets sent to our engineers and they quickly login the offending system and silence it. Usually this takes no or next to no time, the benefit being if it only takes a couple minutes for us, we don't charge for it on an hourly basis. The more we fix the squeaks the less chance that our clients will ever experience the dreaded 'scream'.

backups, backups, backups

...you have backups in place, right? Lets start with some simple questions to refine your answer.

1) do you get a report daily that shows that your backups worked?
2) do you check to ensure your backups include the data you need backed up?
3) do you retrieve data from your backups to ensure you can use them?

If you answered yes to all the above questions, congrats, you are one of about 10% of the population. If you answered no to the above questions, you DO NOT have basic backups of your data. Studies show that 70% of the businesses that have a major data loss are out of business within a year, and for the other 30%, there business is badly hurt.

The cost of not having backups. People usually look at how much they will have to pay to retrieve their data when they have a failure, what they don't look at is how much it costs for having a number of employees not working, or how much ill will you generate with your customers during the outage.

How do you get backups implemented in your company?
1) you must have a hardware backup system usually tape or disk based.
2) you must have a reliable and full featured software to create the backups-don't use the free software that came with your device.
3) you must have the backups stored off site.

next post I'll discuss, the differences between tape and disk, and talk more about software as well....