Not that long ago I upgraded my primary home workstation with some larger hard drives, effectively doubling the internal storage capacity of my machine. I ordered the drives through Dell (Yes, I know, probably my first mistake), mostly because they were on sale, I had a coupon for an additional amou[...]

When the very near term inclusion of an outsourced company assisting with our onsite services to our clients became a reality, I very seriously began to look at various collaboration resources. I did not travel the popular Basecamp route here; instead I’m using a product called Central Desktop. Ce[...]

Something I’ve come to grips with recently is that my quoting process for clients is horrible. I know my products, I know what I deliver, but the process is painful and tedious. Currently I’m using a combination of PDFs, Word Documents and Excel Sheets to create a cohesive quote for services to [...]

There should be a provision in every Managed Service Providers contract with their clients to perform an authorized scan and probe of their client’s networks at least once a quarter. Granted, as a highly professional and efficient MSP, there should never be any holes to exploit, but it is always n[...]

One of the goals I’ve had since day one with my consulting company is to run as lean and efficiently as possible. One of the most simple things that I adhere to in that philosophy is to attempt to prevent any expenses from being generated that are not directly covered by generation of some form of[...]

Since almost the day we started my consulting company I've been wanting to change the name as I haven't truly been happy with it. Personally I am enamored with the idea of running a company with a name like Architel or Everon, and want to change my name to something similar. I believe we may have[...]

I’ve been keeping what amounts to a blog since 1997 in one form or another, but up until starting this blog had always kept my writings more on the personal level. I had brought up ideas or problems I had run into, but always kept a very personal and sometimes adversarial tone to topics. I realize[...]

I awoke this morning to a post on smbITpros.com about CRM and PSA tools, and the limited scope of products a provider had been looking at for the transition to managed services. What interested me the most was Josh’s mention of how he was shocked to see that the provider had only considered Salesf[...]

One of the common themes I’ve found over the years, especially when dealing with potential or new clients, is disconnect between a client’s pricing expectations versus reality. Often a client has been running their business technology needs at a certain level, and is either moving up to the next[...]

Seems that Microsoft has withdrawn its offer to purchase Yahoo. Easiest way to find more details is to hit the Slashdot article. Frankly I'm very happy to hear this news, as I've had some talks and discussions about possibly using Zimbra recently, but was possibly going to delay or scuttle those pro[...]