Technology Category Archives

I work hard. I work a lot. Typically when I have some down time I don’t spend much time, if any, working on my own personal life, and trimming fat or streamlining my processes at home. I do enough of that on a daily basis with my business that I typically spend a lot of time chilling and watching TV[...]

I have long been a proponent of removing tape as a primary backup medium, with the exception of long term offsite archival storage, and this week has clearly reminded me why I no longer recommend tape backups for my clients. The scenario that has reminded me why is as follows: 13 DLT-IV tapes [...]

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. Cent[...]

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 our [...]

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 nic[...]

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 r[...]

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 Salesfor[...]

Seems that Microsoft has withdrawn its offer to purchase Yahoo.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[...]

So I have been reading a lot about Xobni recently, most notably on Lifehacker, and finally received my invite to try the product today. Download was simple and easy, and after about 5 minutes, it had scanned my recent e-mails and moved on to indexing the rest of my mail. Even after just a few min[...]

I have two hosting companies I deal with on a regular basis. The first of course being HostMySite.com, while the other is the big player over at Rackspace. For the most part, both companies offer dedicated managed servers running Windows or Red Hat, with 24x7 Support and quality networks and top not[...]