If you’ve ever used hosted e-mail services like Hotmail or Gmail, you’ve experienced the benefits of cloud computing. You can access your e-mail from anywhere there’s an Internet connection, you can even access it with your cell phone.  It’s available 24-7 anywhere in the world. And if the cloud provider is handling your data, you do not need to worry about backing up your data because it is their responsibility. 

Wouldn’t it be great if all your apps were in the cloud? Let’s think about this further. It could be, but before you go putting all of your eggs in one basket, let’s look at this from a strategic point of view.

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud-based application service providers deliver Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), where the application software resides on the Internet on the cloud service provider’s equipment. Subscribers to the service are in a multi-tenant environment, with all users on the same system in unique partitions keeping their individual data separate from each other.

These applications are usually provided on a monthly service fee subscription model. Depending on the applications, the specific user-configurations, and the time frames being considered, cloud services can be cheaper than buying your own software licenses and owning your own equipment when the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is taken into account.

Any Sufficiently Complex System Will Have Problems – Cloud Computing is No Different

But cloud service providers are not without challenges and vulnerabilities. For instance, what happens when your Internet connection goes down, or when you can’t access the Internet? Or what do you do if the cloud service provider goes down? The cloud is not bulletproof – you need to evaluate your business needs and business risks.

Bandwidth Requirements

As fast as the net is getting, we don’t yet have 10Gbit/sec connections to the Internet – 100Mbit/sec is the practical maximum for small and mid-sized businesses with 10Mbit/sec being the norm and often these connections are asymmetric i.e. you can’t upload as quickly as you can download. It’s just not practical to wait from minutes to hours every time you need to read and write to a multi-GB file. So the cloud is not practical for data intensive businesses like engineers, architects, graphic designers, or video producers. These sorts of businesses need to have their data stored locally with a robust backup plan in place.

Cloud Failure – What Happens When It Goes Down? 

Business owners and stakeholders have to think about what a service outage would look like to their business, and the impacts it could have on their operations. Would you still be able to function in the event of your cloud service provider goes down, or if they were to go out of business? When you go to the cloud, you are completely dependent on circumstances beyond your control. 

Even with your own premises-based equipment, you are still dependent on equipment manufacturers and whoever is supplying your IT support. But you have much more control – if you don’t like your IT services provider, for instance, you can simply hire a different one. It may not be so easy to switch cloud service providers (if there’s another one available to turn to). 

Update: Last week, two of the world’s largest cloud services, namely Gmail from Google and iCloud Mail from Apple were down for selected users around the world for an entire day. Granted, it is difficult to gauge what it feels like to have an outage until someone experiences it. Comments from iCloud and Gmail users, who were affected, perhaps, tell a better story.  iCloud comments are here, while Gmail comments are here. You are the best judge to determine whether you can afford to be down for a few hours or a whole day. 

Where Is Your Data in the Cloud?

You also have less control over where your data is stored and who may have access to it. You cannot count on it being stored locally, even with a locally based cloud provider. It may be sitting on servers in other jurisdictions where there are different laws and standards of data privacy (e.g. the data sitting on servers physically located in the USA is subject to the terms of the Patriot Act, exactly as they are applied to all American citizens).

Build your own Private Cloud

In certain cases, shortcomings can be resolved by building your own version of the cloud. You simply move your own existing server to a local data centre with reliable power, solid Internet access, and airtight security, where you rent rack space as a tenant. You get to continue using all the apps you are already using, not just those available in the cloud marketplace (many of them with limited functionality). And these are the existing apps your staff already know and love, so there is no productivity-eating new learning curve for them to climb.  Also, in certain cases, you may gain the same benefits of web-based accessibility, but on your terms.

Stay in Business Even When Your Server Crashes

Creating your private cloud could also be an investment in your business continuity and disaster recovery strategies (see this earlier Business Insider Tech Tip “What’s the Difference between Backup, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery?”

The added cost of redundant systems could be justified by a business cost analysis showing the dollar-value of lost business/lost opportunity while your systems are down. Imagine, for instance, the cost to a law firm when 30 lawyers are sitting on their hands with unbillable hours while the company e-mail is down. The lost revenue can be crippling if downtime occurs regularly.

Get the Help You Need Figuring Out the Cloud

When it comes to cloud computing, like every other major IT decision, an organization needs to evaluate its business needs and build a meaningful business case.

Technology is nothing more than a catalyst, enabling leverage that makes an organization’s people, and thus the business, more efficient.

Business owners focused on growing their business can often benefit from having outside help to advise on IT options, thereby, allowing for more thoughtful, proactive and strategic business decisions that fit and benefit their specific situation.

Share Your Tips ‘n Tricks

If you have a burning question about how to leverage your IT for your business, or a tip that could help others, please email us at tips@manawa.net.

If we select your tip or question for a future post, you qualify for your choice of:

• A FREE 25-Point Business Technology Audit, or
• A FREE IT Decision Consultation, or
• A One-Month FREE Trial of Manawa’s Dedicated Support Service

It’s natural when something breaks down to want it fixed fast and for as little money as possible. That’s how car repair works right?

But when it comes to an organization’s information technology (IT), companies that stay only in reactive “break-fix” mode miss out on a huge IT return on investment opportunity, not to mention potential competitive advantage. 

On the surface, it may at first look more economical to wait until your systems stops working before calling in an expensive IT repair technician. Especially when you may have already spent a bundle installing those systems in the first place. But whenever a technician has to make a service visit, are they just addressing symptoms, and overlooking possible underlying causes? What if they have to keep coming back because things continue to go wrong? All those site visit repair bills can add up very quickly.

 Are they really fixing the right things for your business? No two organizations are the same. No technician can ever get a full understanding of what your business really needs if the mandate is to fix only what’s broken. Especially when it’s a different technician arriving each time, you consistently have to re-introduce your staff, which makes you feel like you always have to repeat the same things to bring them up to speed on your issues. Companies in a reactive mode stay stuck at this level where they are just patching the existing environment, basically just keeping the lights on. 

Managed IT Services Opens Up a Whole New World of Possibilities

The escalation of IT issues or problems is analogous to the developmental stages of a fire. Initially, an IT problem may develop slowly and may not be noticeable or visible. Soon, smoldering leads to several small brush fires. This is akin to the majority of companies who live in a “perpetual reactive” mode and ignore or are unaware of the small fires. Left unchecked, these fires burn until they become raging fires that cause down time and lost productivity and revenue.  

For a fixed monthly fee, a Managed Services agreement includes real-time 24-7 monitoring of a customer’s systems. This allows problems to be identified and proactively corrected long before they affect the any of the users on the network. Most users happily can go about focusing on starting new projects and competing deadlines without worrying about the system going down or performing very slowly.

Managed Services like those provided by Manawa Networks go further than just ensuring there are no outages. There comes a point when an organization’s IT systems are working so well that there is nothing to fix. IT becomes like a utility that the business can count on. That doesn’t mean there’s no work to do.  With the rich understanding they have gained about how the business works, it is now possible for an IT service provider to get strategic with IT. The dedicated IT support team is in a position to probe questions like: 

• How can the organization’s business processes be improved?
• How could information technology be adjusted and aligned to make business processes work better, become more efficient, and provide better ROI?
• How can the organization make better business decisions about how to spend or reduce its IT budget?
• How can the organization’s IT investment be leveraged for greater competitive advantage?

A Source of Valuable Business Advice

Focusing on just putting out fires and keeping the lights on prevents an IT services provider from ever being able to provide this kind strategic consultative business advice. That only becomes possible when the Managed IT Services provider has a fundamental understanding of a customer’s business.

Just as an Accountant might be expected to provide insight into changes that could affect any one of his customers, a Managed IT Services Provider is in a similar position to make relevant recommendations that can improve business success from an IT perspective. And just like with an Accountant, you expect a trusted advisor to be telling you about these matters long before you have to ask them about them. If you have to ask your IT service provider about a new product or service that is right for your business, they have failed. 

But Don’t Managed IT Services Cost More?

Crossing your fingers and hoping there is nothing to fix could possibly cost you less, but there is no way of knowing for sure. Problems unexpectedly do pop up, and it is impossible to know in advance when and how much repair might be required. Depending on how much unanticipated “break-fix” has to be done in a year, an annual Managed Services agreement might actually end up costing less. Also in your favor, it is in a Managed IT Services provider’s best interest to ensure clients’ IT systems are always working optimally to minimize the amount of repair time they might need to provide under their blanket coverage.

But an even more meaningful way of thinking about an investment in Managed IT Services is to consider the larger business ROI possibilities. For most small businesses, payroll is its single largest on-going expense. What would the 12-month dollar-value be of a hypothetical 5% staff productivity gain – a gain brought on by making their computers run as fast as the day you bought them, allowing them to get more done, and by leveraging recommended IT process improvements? What about having happier people that feel like their technology is empowering them instead of holding them back? What is a more productive, pleasant and piece of mind computing experience worth to you? Could that be worth a $500-$1000 per month investment?

It may be very well worth your while to speak with a Managed IT Services provider to find out more about what Managed Services has much to offer over and above just keeping the lights on.

Share Your Tips ‘n Tricks

If you have a burning question about how to leverage your IT for your business, or a tip that could help others, please email us at tips@manawa.net.

If we select your tip or question for a future post, you qualify for your choice of:

• A FREE 25-Point Business Technology Audit, or
• A FREE IT Decision Consultation, or
• A One-Month FREE Trial of Manawa’s Dedicated Support Service

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In this information age, your data and your computer systems increasingly ARE the business. Imagine if you suddenly no longer had access to that data or those systems. How long could your organization continue to function?

For some businesses, law firms for instance, the simple loss of e-mail could significantly hinder their business and result in loss of big customers. A manufacturer might also be quickly shut down without the data management systems on which it depends to run its production lines. While service-oriented businesses like hair salons or auto dealerships could probably limp along for a few days without access to its scheduling or inventory management software. 

Regardless of what kind of business, every organization has to think about and prepare for what to do if, and when, essential data and systems become unavailable. 

You Need to Do More than Backup Your Data

There are three different kinds of scenarios to consider:

1. Loss of your data – from data corruption or hard disk failure
1. REMEDY: File level backup (a backup copy of your data somewhere else)
2. Loss of your hardware – your server crashes and needs to be replaced
1. REMEDY: Business Continuity (file level backup + bootable copies of your Operating Systems and applications – to restore everything on completely new hardware)
3. Loss of your systems altogether – your office is destroyed by fire or flood, or your building is evacuated for several days (or longer)
1. REMEDY: Disaster Recovery (a fully redundant system, including your backup data, in an alternate location that can be switched on instantly if you lose your ability to operate

Each of these situations requires its own preparedness model due to what’s involved in each scenario to return things to normal. One thing they all share, though, is first figuring out how prepared you want, and need, to be.

Critical Strategic Backup Business Decisions

Organizations must first make some firm decisions about these two critical strategic business issues:

1. How long can the business afford to wait to before being back up and running?

Organizations must establish for themselves their RTO (Recovery Time Objective). How soon do you need to have things back to normal? Within the hour? Tomorrow? Next week?

2. How recent must the backup data be?

Organizations must also establish for themselves their RPO (Recovery Point Objective)

This is the point in time you will go back to with your backup data. How much potential data are you willing to lose? An hour’s worth? A day’s worth? A week’s worth?

The answers to these questions are unique to each business. A bricks-and-mortar retailer, for instance, may not be able to afford turning customers away for more than a few hours if its point-of-sale system is unavailable. But even then, that time sensitivity may vary from retailer to retailer. On the other hand, a general contractor may be OK for days without its computers, although being without e-mail might be a problem.

A Backup is Only As Useful as When the Backup was Last Done

And how up-to-date must the backup data being restored be – i.e.; how frequently must you backup your data? Every second, every hour, every week? Thinking again of retailers, being able to access current sales data right up to moment of failure might be critical, while for that general contractor the loss of a few days data might be acceptable if it can be readily re-created.

These are not just IT decisions. They are strategic operational business decisions that can only be made by all of the relevant stakeholders in the organization.

Backup, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Are Not the Same Thing

Compounding data and systems recovery planning is the wide range of technology choices available for each of the three tiers of keeping the business running. Looking briefly at some of the options for these three scenarios:

1. BACKUP: Loss of your data

Backup to tape or HDD? Offsite storage, or in the cloud? How quickly can backup data be accessed and restored?

2. BUSINESS CONTINUITY: Loss of your hardware

How quickly can a new server be purchased and installed, all your apps be re-installed, and your backup data be restored? Should you be running a redundant on-premises server for quick cut-over? 

3. DISASTER RECOVERY: Loss of your systems altogether

Should you be running a redundant off-site server for instantaneous cut-over? Your own server in a secure data centre, or rented co-tenancy? How will staff access the redundant off-site system, what PCs will they use? 

These scenarios successively build on each other, with increasing complexity and costs associated with each of them.

Backup, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery is a complex subject. You may need outside assistance, like that provided by Manawa Networks, to build meaningful cost-benefit analyses of all the options that best fulfill your chosen RTO and RPO business strategic objectives.

Share Your Tips ‘n Tricks

If you have a burning question about how to leverage your IT for your business, or a tip that could help others, please email us at tips@manawa.net.

If we select your tip or question for a future post, you qualify for your choice of:

• A FREE 25-Point Business Technology Audit, or
• A FREE IT Decision Consultation, or
• A One-Month FREE Trial of Manawa’s Dedicated Support Service

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In an earlier “Business Insider Tech Tip” How to Use Dropbox for Better Document Management and Team Collaboration,  we had discussed how solutions like DropBox, with centralized cloud-based storage, can enable effective document management and team collaboration, especially when team members are not always in the same office. We also highlighted how valuable DropBox can be if your organization does not yet have its own central server installed in your office.

But if you already have a traditional client-server and Local-Area-Network (LAN), as handy as it is to be able to store and access documents in a centralized filing system when you are IN the office, that central storage location becomes quiet useless if you can’t get access to it when you want to work from home, or when you are at a client site, or on a road trip.

Enter the VPN

A VPN (Virtual Private Network) provides a LAN Ethernet cable-like connection over a phone line via the internet between a remote PC and your office’s server. It’s like taking the Cat 5 Ethernet cable at your office and walking home with it, pulling it through the streets, and plugging it into your laptop when you get home. When you want to access the office server from a remote location, VPN software on both your laptop and the server establishes a secure encrypted tunnel in the internet where you are the only occupant of that tunnel.

You dial in with a user name and a password (some solutions have a further security layer with a security ID token, a physical device that spits out a 12-digit number you also key in). You are recognized and allowed to pass-through the firewall that is protecting the server from unauthorized external access.

The Bottleneck that is the Weakest Link

This solution works well, but keep in mind, your connection speed is limited by the bandwidth of the internet connection you are using. So if you are working from home using residential internet access, data is only fast coming into you. But it can be painfully slow going the other way, especially if you are wanting to upload a big file to the office server.

You may not notice this bandwidth limitation if you are working with Word or Excel documents where the applications are installed on the remote machine you are using. But VPNs are not suited for access to so-called “fat” (i.e.; big) applications installed on your server – accounting software like QuickBooks or SimplyAccounting for instance, or other essential business management software.

Applications like these are designed to work only with full bi-directional LAN Ethernet speeds (at a consistent 100 or 1000 MB/sec). Remote access to fat server-based apps is possible, but only with expensive enterprise-class solutions like Citrix MetaFrame or Microsoft Terminal Services which are too costly for most small businesses.

Low-Cost Alternatives

Third-party remote control solutions like the LogMeIn or TeamViewer freeware or GoToMy PC can be useful, but they are more designed for accessing a single machine’s files or for desktop sharing rather than for connecting with your server. They also operate in a stand-alone environment (i.e.; they are not integrated with your office LAN) and provide no capability for calendar and contacts sharing with work-mates, and no centralized repository of your e-mails.

An Elegant Cost-Effective Totally Integrated Solution

If you have not yet invested in an office server, Microsoft’s Small Business Server product  is a great solution for remote access. It is limited to a maximum of 75 users, but this is often way more than enough for many small businesses.

In addition to Windows Server centralized document storage and access, it comes bundled with:

• Remote Web Access (for secure full remote access to all your fat apps installed elsewhere on the server)
• Exchange Server (for e-mail and company-wide calendar and contacts sharing)
• Outlook Web Access (remote access to all your e-mails)
• Real-time BlackBerry syncing 
• SharePoint (useful for internal web portals and internal company home pages)

The total cost for a staff of 15, including all licensing and hardware (i.e.; the dedicated server PC) is around $5k (priced separately all these components add up to over $10k). It’s also versatile with Mac computers also being able to connect to it.

In a future post we will be looking at some of the other main reasons that deploying a central server becomes inevitable for most small businesses.

Share Your Tips ‘n Tricks

If you have a burning question about how to leverage your IT for your business, or a tip that could help others, please email us at tips@manawa.net.

If we select your tip or question for a future post, you qualify for your choice of:

• A FREE 25-Point Business Technology Audit, or
• A FREE IT Decision Consultation, or
• A One-Month FREE Trial of Manawa’s Dedicated Support Service

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Your Desktop in Your Pocket
These USB, CF and SD flash memory drives and cards are highly portable, convenient and durable, given that they have no moving parts.  And with the price tag for storage volumes up to as much as 64GBs becoming increasingly affordable (below $100), it’s easier than ever to carry around all your data in your pocket and simply plug the flash drive into the USB port on whatever computer is available wherever you are working.

Every Drive Needs to be Formatted Before It Can Be Used
USB flash drives and CF and SD cards typically come already formatted and ready to receive data, usually in the FAT32 file system as it can be used in both Windows and Mac environments. But just like with conventional Hard Disk Drives (HDDs), you can also format flash drives yourself, say for instance if you wanted to delete all the data on it.

Choices, Choices
When using the Windows operating system, you are presented with several format options: FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS. Which should you pick?

Let’s look at each of them in turn.

FAT32
FAT32 (FAT stands for File Allocation Table) has been around since Windows 95 OSR2, and as mentioned can be both read from and written to by both Windows and Mac computers. One of its limitations, though, is you cannot put files on it any bigger than 4GBs. Another issue is that you might lose or corrupt data on the drive if you pull it out of the USB port without first using the “Safely Eject Media” command, or shutting down the PC. 

NTFS
NTFS (or NT File System) is a newer file system format that emerged with Windows NT and Windows 2000 and works with Windows only (however Macs can read NTFS). It’s still the standard file system to this day up to and including Windows 7. 

NTFS is a journaling file system – system activity is logged in a journal on the drive as it occurs, so if a process is interrupted it can resume where it left off. This is great for flash drives because you can pull them out of the USB port without first using the “Safely Eject Media” command or shutting down the machine with no worry of data loss or corruption. But to do this, NTFS is constantly reading and writing to the flash drive which reduces its life span. And data transfer is much, much slower – up to eight times slower than FAT32 (only 4 MB/sec compared to up to 30MB/sec with FAT32).  But NTFS formatted flash drives can also hold larger file sizes – up to 16 Terabytes. And they can also be compressed and encrypted.

exFAT
exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table) is a patent-pending proprietary file system developed by Microsoft designed especially for flash drives. It can hold file sizes up to 16ExaBytes (16-million GBs), but it has current or potential compatibility issues with other operating systems. And unlike NTFS, it does not allow file compression nor encryption (FAT32 also does not support compression or encryption).

A useful chart listing the attributes of each of these file system formats can be found at http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm  .

Don’t Lose Your Data
If you choose FAT32, one final cautionary thought. Just because your application appears to have completed saving, there might still be caching going on and data input/output could still be in progress with the drive. Interrupting that could corrupt or destroy your data. When removing the USB flash drive from the PC, to be certain there is no input/output going on, and that the device is “unhooked”, always use the “Safely Eject Media” command. In Windows XP, Vista and 7, you can also go to your computer icon and then right click on the flash drive and select “Eject”. The only safe alternative is to shut down the PC entirely (NOT Hibernate – Hibernate stores the system state as if the machine was still running).

Share Your Tips ‘n Tricks
If you have a burning question about how to leverage your IT for your business, or a tip that could help others, please email us at tips@manawa.net.

If we select your tip or question for a future post, you qualify for your choice of:

• A FREE 25-Point Business Technology Audit, or
• A FREE IT Decision Consultation, or
• A One-Month FREE Trial of Manawa’s Dedicated Support Service

Seldom do you learn about these time-savers by reading the manual. You might accidentally discover it when you ask yourself “I wonder what this command does?”, or by seeing someone else use it. Or maybe you come across it from a blog post like this one.

We will be regularly sharing “Power User Habits, Tips n Tricks” shown to us by our customers and shared among our team, as part of our on-going commitment to help small businesses get the most out of their IT infrastructure investments.

 In today’s post, two quick tips:

• Using Email Flags in Outlook and Your Smartphone
• The BlackBerry Space Bar

 Using Email Flags in Outlook and Your Smartphone

You are not always sitting at your desk in front of your PC, ready to respond immediately to every email you receive. And often email messages reach you on your smart phone when you are out of the office. When that happens, it is not always possible to respond right away.

You can prioritize messages and ensure you do not forget about them by quickly marking them as a “Flag for Follow Up” in your smart phone’s email client. You can even color-code them, specifying a future follow up time. If your device is set up to sync with your Outlook email account, these flags will also appear in your desktop Outlook when you get back to the office (BlackBerry’s need to be running through a BES server).

 The BlackBerry Space Bar

Speaking of BlackBerry’s, when keying in an email address in an email address field, you can hit the space bar at the appropriate place to automatically insert the “@” and “.” symbols. Typing in…

            john – space bar – smith – space bar – abc – space bar – com

…will appear as   john.smith@abc.com 

This trick prevents you from having to hit the “alt” key and search for type the “@” and “.” symbols, and can save you many precious seconds of keyboard thumbing.

Share Your Tips ‘n Tricks

If you have a burning question about how to leverage your IT for your business, please email us at tips@manawa.net.

If we select your tip or question for a future post, you qualify for your choice of:

If we select your tip or question for a future post, you qualify for your choice of:

• A FREE 25-Point Business Technology Audit, or
• A FREE IT Decision Consultation, or
• A One-Month FREE Trial of Manawa’s Dedicated Support Service

It’s time to get a new laptop. You are looking forward to something lighter, with a faster processor and more storage. Should you get it with a conventional Hard Disk Drive (HDD), or one of those new Solid State Drives (SSD)? The marketing messages make SSDs sound like the next big thing, but are they worth the extra expense? What exactly are they anyway? And how are they different from conventional HDDs?

HDD Basics

Hard disk drive technology has been around for a long time, and its reliability continues to improve. Think of HDDs like magnetic versions of old-fashioned vinyl LPs. A “needle” moves across a platter covered with magnetic material, picking up the data stored on the surface of the disk. That same magnetic head “needle” also writes data to the disk. HDDs have become a lot smaller over the years – terabytes of data being stored on a disk just 2-1/2 inches in diameter is normal today.

Flash NAND Technology

SSDs, on the other hand, use a technology just like that used on SD and Compact Flash cards in your digital camera. Microscopic “cells” are designed to hold varying amounts of voltage to represent the binary on-off states captured magnetically in hard drives. These millions of cells are microscopically small, with data able to be held in a much smaller space than on HDDs. 

Why SSDs are Better Than HDDs

Apart from their size, the biggest difference between as SSD and an HDD is – there are no moving parts, making SSDs potentially more durable and reliable. With an SSD on board instead of an HDD, there are no worries about destroying your data if should you drop your laptop on the floor.

And because there is no magnetic head having to search for and move to the right location on an HDD’s spinning disk to access desired data, SSDs can access data more quickly, meaning you can get your work done faster.  And without any moving parts, SSDs are cooler and use less power, meaning you get longer battery life in your laptop.

SSDs Achilles Heel

Given these benefits, why would you NOT want to upgrade to an SSD? The one major down-side to them is they can wear out faster than HDDs. Every time a cell in an SSD takes on a specified voltage to hold data, its ability to take and hold a charge in future is reduced, albeit an infinitesimally small amount.

This phenomenon is compounded with MLC (multi-level cell) SSDs, a widely-used technique that puts multiple voltage levels on each cell to increase storage capacity.

An SSD’s life-span is determined by how much saving and re-saving is done, along with the size of the files being saved. Depending on how you use your laptop, 3-5 years might be expected before the symptoms of failure begin to appear.

Warning signs include extremely slow performance as the SSD struggles to find cells still with a good charge-holding capability – you will start to see longer save-times for documents, system lock-ups or crashes, or the “blue screen of death”. These are the same kinds of signs of failure that also show up with HDDs. 

What SSDs are Good For

SSDs are not recommended for data intensive uses like digital media, graphics design,  downloading and erasing/re-writing movies, or any regular computing activity where large quantities of data are constantly being churned. HDDs are the better bet for these kinds of uses, despite them performing more slowly than SSDs. But for general office productivity, business documents, music downloads and other one-time writes, SSDs can typically last without difficulty until the natural end of life cycle of the laptop. 

Disk manufacturer Seagate has developed a hybrid hard drive with SSD-like flash memory to cache and store the most frequently accessed data. As the operating system is typically the most frequently accessed data on a drive, it ends up in flash memory providing zippy system performance bypassing the slower HDD.

Whichever drive you select, keep in mind manufacturers estimate that over a three-year period, one in every 50 HDDs or SSDs will fail. A disciplined data backup protocol is essential.

Share Your Tips ‘n Tricks

Or If you have a burning question about how to leverage your IT for your business, please email us at tips@manawa.net.

If we select your tip or question for a future post, you qualify for your choice of:

• A FREE 25-Point Business Technology Audit, or
• A FREE IT Decision Consultation, or
• A One-Month FREE Trial of Manawa’s Dedicated Support Service 

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Imagine a scenario where your annual budget is being saved on each of the separate computers of the three people working on it – the CEO’s laptop, the Controller’s desktop PC, and by the outside financial analyst working from his home office. Which of those three documents is the current one? All of them. Which version is the most complete? Again, every one of them. A classic case of multiple versions of the truth. Confusing to say the least. 

Or imagine another scenario where  one of your sales executives is on the road in another city closing the company’s biggest deals. But their proposal is based on out-dated pricing information that had changed from the time their laptop was last synchronized before they left the office. A very costly disconnect if those changed numbers happen to be working against you.

Traditional but Expensive Collaboration Tools

Setting up remote access to the company’s office server can address these challenges, letting remote users create, open, and save documents just as if they were at their desks, always working with the most recent versions of documents saved to the server. But what if your small firm or start-up doesn’t yet have a server? But even if you do have one, you may still need expensive internet connection or VPN upgrades to make it work.

Even then, you still could end up with multiple “true” versions of the same document. And what if you want to roll back to a previous version of a document? For that you need to install additional software on your server like Microsoft SharePoint. All users could then see the most recent changes, even making simultaneous edits at the same time. But that power comes with a cost – SharePoint is notoriously difficult and expensive to set up, maintain and administer. 

Cloud-Based Document Management

You may have heard of cloud-based file sharing and document management solutions like Dropbox and Box.com.  But they can also serve as very powerful, easy to use and inexpensive team collaboration tools, acting like a virtual server in the cloud.

Dropbox stands out from the pack for its being able to ensure everyone is seeing and working on the same single version of the truth.

Why Dropbox is a Better Document Management Solution

Like similar cloud-based solutions, Dropbox gives users a secure dedicated amount of storage space on its servers accessed via an internet connection (a free account offers 2GB, while 50GB is just $9.99/user per month). To this space you can upload via an SSL connection any kind of file up to your limit.  DropBox  can be installed as a desktop application on Windows, Mac and Linux and also has an app for the iPad, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices. And like other similar solutions, no specialized technical expertise is needed.

But what sets Dropbox apart is the small lightweight application you install on all the PCs you want to have be included in a Dropbox group. On each of these PCs, laptops or smart phones a special Dropbox folder is created. Anytime anyone in a Dropbox group copies or saves a file to this folder, it automatically appears in the Dropbox folder on every other user’s machine in the group. This means everyone is always seeing the exact same synchronized document.

It also means when you do not have an internet connection (say when you’re on a plane) you can still be working on documents in your Dropbox folder. Your changes will be pushed back up to your Dropbox space in the cloud the next time you are connected.

But what if someone else in the group has also been making changes while you were offline? Dropbox keeps track of all of the separate versions that have been saved and synced that anyone in the group can re-visit anytime.

The only things Dropbox is not capable of for collaboration is calendar and address book sharing. And, even though it’s making copies of your documents, it is not intended as a proper backup solution. We’ll be discussing those two topics in future posts. 

Share Your Tips ‘n Tricks

Or If you have a burning question about how to leverage your IT for your business, please email us at tips@manawa.net.

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• A FREE 25-Point Business Technology Audit, or
• A FREE IT Decision Consultation, or
• A One-Month FREE Trial of Manawa’s Dedicated Support Service 

Image sources here and here

Our customers are smart (after all, they chose Manawa) and great at what they do.  We recently took a poll asking our customers what topics they want to learn about or more importantly what burning questions keeps them up at night, that they wish somebody would tell or show them the answer.

They responded, telling us that technology is now an integral part of their professional and personal lives. They are overwhelmed and want technology to help them do more and get more done to be more successful. They want to be better informed, when making decisions and want to know how technology can be used to improve productivity, enhance quality of life and get the most value for their hard earned money.

As a result, we created “Business Insider Tech Tips”, a weekly series, that will appear on our blog and newsletter, directed at decision makers in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises.

Today’s Business Insider Tech Tip is about minimizing errors and embarrassment when sending emails using Microsoft Outlook. It comes from a customer, who sat me down in his office, excited to share his knowledge about a tool called NK2edit that works with Microsoft Outlook. I consider myself a veteran, having supported customers with their IT needs for more than a decade.  So, I’m delighted and humbled when a customer takes the time to teach me something new that I can share with other customers.

NK2edit is a tool that allows a user to easily edit or remove unwanted email addresses that appear in their AutoComplete list. The AutoComplete list is a separate list of email addresses from your contacts that gets updated when you send people email by typing their email address in the TO field of Outlook. The next time you type the first few characters of an email address in the TO field, Outlook will show a list of suggested email addresses based on the best match.

For example, if you type an email to a paul@…, the next time you type the letter ‘p’, this same email address along with all others that start with ‘p’ that have ever been sent in Outlook automatically appear.

Unfortunately, over time this list can get quite large and polluted with email addresses of people who you longer have contact with. Even if you delete emails from your contact list, they won’t be removed from the Autocomplete list.

N2KEdit is free for personal use and makes maintaining the Autocomplete list simple. And to think I’ve been doing it the hard way all these years. Thanks Z!

If you have a burning question about how to leverage your IT for your business, please email us at tips@manawa.net.

If we select your question to write about, you qualify for your choice of:

·         A FREE 25-Point Business Technology Audit, or

·         A FREE IT Decision Consultation, or

·         A One-Month FREE Trial of Manawa’s Dedicated Support Service

I’d like to share a story about the best Christmas present I could have asked for, and in fact, have ever received. It was simply to have my dad come home to his family healthy.  I received a call from my mom that dad had a heart attack at the cottage while he was collecting firewood on Friday, December 9^th in Muskoka.

At the time, I was at our annual Manawa Christmas party, celebrating another successful year with the entire team.  It was a joy reminiscing about a great year, joking and reconnecting with colleagues and friends.

Early that day, my dad started to experience severe chest pains, headache and numbness in his arms while gathering wood. After getting back to the cottage, my mom called Dr. Lester Affoo, a GP and family friend, who has a nearby cottage. Lester practices in Alliston and asked my parents to drive to Southlake Regional Health Centre in Newmarket immediately. As they drove, Lester called to check on them every 10 minutes.

When they arrived, Lester was at the emergency entrance waiting. My dad was admitted and monitored by the emergency department staff. While in the emergency department my dad’s symptoms had improved and the ECG looked normal. Lester went to see Dr. Steve Minor, a professional colleague, who is a Cardiac Interventionist at Southlake. Dr. Minor saw my dad after his current patient and performed an angiogram and angioplasty.  Dr. Minor said my dad’s arteries were severely blocked and was surprised he made it out of the woods. My dad was transferred to the Cardiovascular Care Ward and on Saturday was met by Dr. Charles Peniston, the surgeon. Dr. Peniston told my dad he would need triple bypass surgery and scheduled it for Sunday morning.

Our family stayed with my dad as long we could until visiting hours ended Saturday evening.  We said our goodbyes. My dad told us how proud he was of each of us and how much he loved us. My dad had one simple wish saying, “I just want to wake up after surgery and see you all again”. Sunday morning was one of the longest days in my life, waiting for any news of dad’s surgery. When someone’s life is in the hands of a few healthcare trusted professionals down the hall, time feels ever so precious. We were heartened when the surgeon came out and informed us the surgery had gone well. My dad would be kept asleep in the Cardiovascular ICU, until his vitals stabilized. We stayed with my dad while he was sleeping all day Sunday. On Monday, when my dad awoke, he was ecstatic to see us, to see the hospital staff, to see everyone. His wish had come true.

The quote below by William Arthur Ward sums up the emotional jubilation and overwhelming gratitude my dad felt after he woke up for the hospital staff on the Cardiac ICU floor.  

“Feeling gratitude and not expressing it

 is like wrapping a present and not giving it.”

 Well, my dad, whose name is Randy by the way, didn’t waste any time and sent the rest of the family on an errand for chocolate truffles – all 150 lbs. of chocolate! He wanted to personally give every staff member at the hospital on the fifth floor a box. He walked through the hallways in his Hospital gown with his “Harry Potter like” glasses interrupting anyone to give each and every staff member truffles. It didn’t matter whether they were a cleaner, admin, security guard, nurse or doctor.  A nurse who hadn’t worked on my dad asked, “Everyone is getting chocolates?”  As my dad handed a box to the cleaner, he expressed with sincere appreciation saying to them both:

“You all worked on me, because if the guard wasn’t keeping everyone safe, and the cleaners weren’t keeping things clean and sanitary, you couldn’t work. Even though you didn’t work on me directly you were doing something else for someone else freeing up the people who did. Without all of you, I wouldn’t be here.”

Dad asked each and every person involved in his care and recovery to sign his heart-shaped pillow, because he wanted to remember the people who helped save his life. Now, as he recovers at home, dad often gets teary-eyed looking at the signatures on the pillow, feeling a sense of connectedness. He knows the Southlake staff are right there with him. Each time he grasps the pillow against his chest to push back the pain when he coughs, he feels that same support and love he experienced at the hospital.

An Attitude of Gratitude is a popular theme during the Christmas season. I believe the amazing care and attention my dad received would be the same had he been admitted to Southlake at any time of year. Organizations that deliver incredible service to customers do so because of the talented team of people that consistently deliver.

And that brings me to nurses, a group known for working long hours and being underappreciated for their contribution. A website, called Nurse Uncut, an online community for nurses ran a contest asking nurses why they choose the profession.

Just like the staff at Southlake, their responses offer a glimpse into their “Attitude of gratitude” view that extends far beyond the holiday season. Three contest responses, for which we might learn from are:

1. “True fulfillment comes when you know that you’ve rendered love and care selflessly to a complete stranger.”

2. “Because each day I go home feeling like in some small way I have helped at least one person. Whether it is a clean bed, assistance to walk to the bathroom or a shoulder to cry on. Someone feels better due to the attention they receive from me. Even the flower in my hair makes someone smile!”

3. “I’ve stayed with Nursing because it has enabled me to journey deeply and broadly in understanding what it means to live a human life. By encouraging compassion, common sense and communication in all of life’s situations, inside and outside “nursing”, it has given me gratitude, joy and laughter.”

Nurses truly are ambassadors of compassion, care and good will. They live an attitude of gratitude for their patients (my dad seen with some nursing and hospital staff above).  I’m glad our family was able to recognize them with our small gesture of appreciation. Life really is like a box of chocolates and you never know what you’re going to get. I got the best Christmas present ever. My dad did too! Our family and Manawa Networks wish you and your family a safe and joyful holiday season and a new year filled with gratitude and success.