WiFi for Business

By Homer Bartlett

Eight to ten years ago many businesses added WiFi networks to their offices using what was ubiquitous at the time. Namely, inexpensive access points like the Linksys WAP54G (don’t take that the wrong way, it’s a great WAP and we still have love for this venerable old workhorse). Many people had similar devices installed at home, and since they worked fine there, well why not the office too? And for most folks they did work fine at the office. If you had 30 people in the office but only 3 of them had laptops, an inexpensive consumer-grade wireless access point could keep up just fine.

Fast forward to 2012 and these days most small businesses (well the majority of small businesses we service anyway) run predominantly on laptops. Some are 100% laptops, with no desktop computers in sight. Heck some of our clients don’t have assigned desks, they just have work spaces that employees float into and out of, and in places like that everyone is all wireless, all the time.

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How Do I Get the Awesome Version?

By Homer Bartlett

A good friend of Ripple (and a client, natch!) wrote a post about asking for the best price. That’s always a good idea, of course, but I think there’s a question to be asked prior to that question: “How do I get the awesome version?” Not for everything, mind you, but for the stuff you care about, the stuff that matters, searching for the lowest price first almost guarantees that you will get what you paid for.

Asking “how do I get the awesome version,” even if it’s only rhetorical, helps you and anyone you talk to establish the starting point, continue reading

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Storing Passwords

By Homer Bartlett

If you follow password security guidelines, you should have a unique password for each online service you use. That way if one service provider does get compromised and some ne’er-do-well in Russia gets your password, he can’t get into all the other online services he might guess that you use. But a study from 2010 reveals that 75% of people use the same password for social media sites that they use for their email. Why? Well one obvious reason is a false sense of security, but a more practical reason is convenience. Who wants to (or can) remember dozens of unique passwords? Some folks keep a text document or spreadsheet with their various passwords in it. But typical desktop software has notoriously weak password protection, so instead here are 2 better ways to do it, one for Mac and one for Windows. continue reading

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Adobe Introduces Subscription Licensing

By Homer Bartlett

One of the great aspects of cloud computing, or software-as-a-service, is that it scales efficiently (making it a good strategy for operating in tough financial times). Paying per mailbox per month for email hosting, for instance, scales down gracefully when your summer interns go back to school. But if you had an internal Exchange server you would have had to purchase Exchange Client Access Licenses (CALs) for those interns to have mailboxes, CALs that now sit idle for 9 months, money wasted.

With the introduction of Creative Suite 5.5, Adobe has introduced Subscription Licensing, whereby you can pay per month for the software you need, rather than buying the licenses outright. This makes a lot of sense for creative companies who might have some number of permanent creatives on staff and bring in contractors and freelancers on a project basis. Bringing in a freelancer for a 3-month project? Not sure you’ll still have enough work in a couple of months to keep that new designer you just hired? Don’t shell out $1,700 for CS5.5 Design Premium, “rent” it instead for $139/month.

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What’s an iPad Really Good For?

By Homer Bartlett

By Glenn Fleishman from Seattle, Washington (Behold the iPad in All Its Glory) [CC-BY-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Image via Wikipedia

The last time I was an early adopter of technology was when I blew 1100 bucks on an Apple Newton. I was convinced it was the future, and showed it to everyone. I tried like hell to make it part of my normal life for about 6 months before realizing the effort required wasn’t justified by the payoff. It was the future, but not until it was 75% smaller and had a Palm logo on it.

These days I wait months, sometimes years, for a new product to prove itself before I’ll spend money on it. So you can understand that I was in no hurry to buy an iPad, and only have one (actually two!) because my generous Apple evangelist boss gave them to all of us as end-of-year bonuses. Having used one for about 4 weeks, I can tell you that an iPad makes a really decent eBook reader.

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Mobile Workforce

By Homer Bartlett

“I need them here so I can keep an eye on them, make sure they’re working and not stealing from me.”

We hear this occasionally from small business owners when we are discussing VPN or other remote access capabilities for their employees. We went through this same discussion internally years ago. At some point we realized that if we have to worry about our employees actually working, or worse, stealing from us, we’ve hired the wrong people, or we haven’t defined our expected results, or probably both.

The ones who are asking for remote access are the ones who want to work, and want to be able to work while they’re waiting for the doctor, or even more likely, when they’re at one of our clients. Our experience taught us to define the expected results, give people the tools they need, and let them succeed. Or let them fail and send them on their way. But we don’t build roadblocks.

Our founder, Mike Landman, wrote a nifty bit about our experience with mobility for Smart Business Magazine. Head here to read it.

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Are Managed Services Just Insurance?

By Homer Bartlett

Homer Bartlett, Ripple IT Consultant

When we talk to people about managed IT services we frequently hear something like this: “So we pay a little each month to ensure that we’re covered when something bad happens, rather than paying a lot when it happens. That’s basically insurance, right?” Sort of. We don’t think of it as insurance because we proactively invest in processes, monitoring, and tools to prevent bad things from happening. I started to write that insurance doesn’t proactively try to prevent problems, but that’s not exactly true.

At a macro level, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) tests cars and pushes for laws to improve vehicle safety. And though it is not directly tied to insurance companies, certification by the Underwriters Laboratories (UL) is often a prerequisite for items being installed into an insured environment. Insurance companies don’t appear to do much on a micro level though. For instance, would an annual home inspection help prevent homeowners insurance claims? If so it seems like that would be a smart investment. continue reading

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Computer Warranties

By Homer Bartlett

We always recommend replacing computers every 3 years and maintaining a next business day (“NBD”) onsite repair warranty on them for those 3 years. It’s one of the core principles of successfully delivering managed services and IT support for small business. Why? On average roughly 1 in 5 laptops fail in the first 3 years (1 in 3 if you include failures due to accidents). Desktops are typically more reliable, but these days more of our clients in Atlanta are opting for laptops than desktops. After year 3 the failure rate goes up about 20% per year, and the likelihood of downtime from malware and viruses goes up even faster. Not to mention the headaches involved when trying to upgrade a piece of business-critical software on an older PC that doesn’t meet the new minimum requirements. When your computer fails, and all of them eventually do, if you have no warranty you’re looking at either a potentially expensive repair or an emergency replacement. Even with overnight shipping it’s a couple business days of downtime and disruption to your work. With a mail-in warranty, you’ll get a box from the repair center (1 business day), send it off for repair (1-2 business days), the center will repair it (1-2 business days), then they’ll ship it back to you (1 business day). How many days of business did you just lose? With NBD onsite repair service, a repair person trained by the manufacturer will be at your place of business the next business day, and they can almost always complete the repair in a couple hours. So given the average failure rates, and the process involved in repair, we think NBD onsite service is a wise investment. It typically adds about $180 to the price of a business class laptop, and for some business laptop lines a 3-year NBD onsite warranty is the standard service (you have to opt out of it if you don’t want it). For folks who travel often or are accident-prone, NBD onsite warranties with accidental damage coverage can make sense too. More Info

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Best Practices for System Lifecycles

By Homer Bartlett

Macintosh Plus I met with a new client the other day to deliver an assessment report. At the start of each new client relationship we evaluate their existing IT infrastructure and practices and deliver a report that serves as a baseline, from which we can measure our attempts to improve things. Reviewing the report with the client also introduces them to some of our core principles.

One of those core principles is that you must look past the initial product purchase and see the whole system, and that system’s lifecycle. That means budgeting time and money for ongoing maintenance and support, upgrades, and replacements

A system’s lifecycle includes initial purchase, installation and training, ongoing maintenance and support, upgrades, and replacement, then the cycle starts over again. For this client, who believes strongly in processes and planning, when we got to the report section in which we talk about laptop replacement cycles he realized that they budget for laptops and software licenses for each new hire, but they don’t have a recurring budget item for software upgrades or laptop replacements. Here’s some common system lifecycle examples:

• Replace workstation every 3 years (and keep an active warranty on them while in use).

• Microsoft releases a new version of Office every 3 years, roughly.

• Adobe releases a new Creative Suite every 18 months, roughly.

This concept is not unique to IT, of course. After the air conditioner is installed you still need to replace the filter periodically, perform annual (or twice annual) maintenance, and have the ducts cleaned every couple of years. All that maintenance is just to ensure reliable operation and long life, and one day you will have to replace the air conditioner too. Are you focused on the products or do you see the systems and their lifecycles, and budget for them too?

There are a lot of IT-related things to manage on top of computer warranties. Things like software licenses, internet service providers, wiring guys, etc. We work with vendors on behalf of our clients to ensure they’re always secure, up-to-date and legal. If you’re not a Ripple client, we suggest keeping a log of when all hardware and software purchases are made and when their licenses and warranties expire.

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Random Collection of Tips

By Homer Bartlett

If you have an Android phone:

Set an unlock pattern or code if you keep anything at all sensitive on your phone.
Install Mobile Defense.

If you have a Mac and you copy and paste a lot: Install JumpCut. If you have a Windows Vista or Windows 7 computer: learn about Volume Shadow Service.

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