BUSINESS PHONE NEWS

Business Operations Technology Start-up Tools for New Business Owners

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
951-251-5155 email

So you've taken the leap and decided to start your own business?

Fortunately business technology has become much more affordable over the past decade which means that even a start-up business can look like a Fortune 500 business if you select the right technology tools to operate your business.

Below you can see a video that covers some of the basics. Also presented are some good business technology ideas from the national Small Business Administration website.

 

Call Us for Customized Technology Plan Created for Your Unique Needs

We're business technology experts that work with very large, multi-location businesses as well as very small businesses that are just getting started with a couple part-time employees. We can give you quick advice over the phone or schedule a complimentary consulting meeting to analyze your unique business technology requirements.

On our consulting call we'll seem a lot smarter if you have some general ideas about where you want to start with technology, how many employees you'll want to support over the next couple years as well as what your technology budget can afford.  Please review the rest of the information on this page and watch the vide.  Then give us a call and we'll explore your thoughts and share with you some of the solutions our other business clients are successfully using.

Using Technology to Stay Competitive from SBA.org
As a business owner, it is vital that you understand and use advanced technologies. Technology can help increase business efficiency and even expand operations.

Accounting software. This is important, even if you have your own accountant or bookkeeper. Accounting software allows you to see your profits and losses at a glance. It can also help you design and maintain a budget for your business.

Planning software or tools. A calendar system is a must. There are many online planning systems that can be utilized to help you keep your calendar organized. Find a system that meets your business' needs and be sure to stick with it.

Time tracking software.  A time tracking device will help you determine what tasks result in a profit and what tasks do not. This will help you determine what tasks can be eliminated, outsourced, or improved.  If you’re looking at software that requires a fee, ask for a free trial first to make sure it’s the right software for you.

Email management. As a business owner, you probably use several email accounts to manage the various aspects of your company. If you streamline these emails to one account, you'll be able to stay organized and abreast of your emails.

Mobile internet access. Access to the internet on your mobile device will not only make your life easier, it will also help you maintain a positive reputation for your business. For example, if you are able to follow up with a client by email immediately after a meeting, you will be showing that you are accessible, timely and professional.

Once you decide which types of technology are right for you and your business, you'll be on your way to being more organized and efficient than ever.

 

Photo credit: iStockPhoto.com # 11930996

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Here's Your 5-Point 2013 Office Communications Technology Checklist (to Not Get Fired)

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
951-251-5155 email

Sure, the economy seems to be picking up a bit but 2013 would still be a rotten year to get fired by your boss (or your customers).  

To help you keep your job (or make more money), following is a short, 5-point checklist of what you need to be looking at in the area of "office communications technology".

Please run through this checklist as soon as you can because "unified communications" is getting cheaper and sticking with outdated technology is getting more expensive.

1. Connect Your Offices Better - The same connections that connect your computers together in your office are now inexpensively available to connect your offices together in a secure environment.

Ethernet & MPLS are two technologies that allow any business owner to use to connect the local area network (LAN) of each separate office over a single wide area network (WAN) to eliminate the perceived communications barrier of distance.

 

2. Bond Better Bandwidth - If the contracts for the bandwidth you're using to connect your offices together or to connect to the internet are more than twelve months old then you're either paying too much or you're missing out on needed diversity.

Most MPLS WANs that have been around for a while are creeping along at T-1 speeds of 1.54 megs at very high prices. If you're got a T-1 based MPLS, make sure you're getting the best price and check out how cheaply you can "bond" more and better bandwidth to or around your current WAN connections.

What constitutes "better"? Cheaper and faster. While an MPLS network is still viewed by many as the most secure way to communicate critical data between locations, not all of your business traffic needs to traverse over a gold-plated WAN. Take all your business "junk" data traffic off your MPLS and route it over low-cost data connections like cable, DSL or satellite using either equipment or software that shapes and prioritizes your business data traffic.

 

3. Unify Your Phone System in the Cloud - Seriously, why is your phone system still in your broom closet, server room or basement? While a reasonable argument can still be made that owning a phone system might be cheaper in the long run than "renting" one via many current "hosted VoIP" or "unified communications" business phone system solutions, even businesses that own their own phone systems are moving them to "the cloud".

If you're a business owner with multiple locations you already know how important it is to have your multiple locations all function as one. Just as you can connect your multiple local area network computers over a single wide area network you can now connect the desk and mobile phones of all your offices and remote employees over a single phone system.

If you own more than one phone system or callers to your main phone number can't be routed to any employee or any office then 2013 should be the year that you change that. The technology to accomplish this has been real world tested for over a decade and it's finally affordable.

 

4. Become Indestructible - How many single points of failure do you have engineered into your multi-location business critical voice and date systems? What happens if your basement floods? What happens if your main telecom carrier goes down? What happens if your employees can not physically be present in one or more of your offices for a week?

If you've already implemented the first three points on this list then you're already half-prepared to become an indestructible, fully-redundant, self-healing business. To become a fully indestructible business simply go through your wide area network diagram and start "breaking connections" and blowing up servers.

If one communication path is blocked, where's the re-route? If one application or data set is destroyed, where is the backup and how quickly is it moved from secondary to primary? You'll soon see that having multiple network service connections from multiple vendors that can also provide "managed services" like remote data backup and remote hosted applications can easily make you completely indestructible without your having to buy more in-house equipment or software.

 

5. Eliminate all Desk Chairs - By completing the first four items on this list you'll have prepared all your non-human business assets for increased profitability. To properly prepare your employees to take advantage of your office communication technology upgrades, eliminate all desk chairs.

Think about it. Can your employees shake hands with new prospects or current customers while sitting at their desk? Why are they sitting at their desks anyway? Probably because there's a chair there.

If your best employees insist that there are profit increasing activities that they can only engage in while parked at their desk, make a list of all those activities so you can find, migrate or create an office software application that can allow that activity to be completed using a smartphone or tablet computer while your best employees are visiting with customers or prospects or traveling between costumers and prospects.

 

Who Can Help You With These Checklist Items? Call Us!

Office communications technology is blurring the lines between phones, computers and "the cloud". It's also getting cheaper and more complicated every day.

To help you decide whether the business communication technology advances of 2012 mandate that you spend or move money around differently in 2013 talk to a business communication technology expert. Click here to find one near you.

 

Keywords: office communication technology, application, redundant, self-healing, business phone system, cloud, hosted voip, unified communications, MPLS, wan, cable, dsl, satellite, t-1, bandwidth, ethernet, lan, local area network, wide area network, checklist. Image: iStock

New FCC Smartphone Database Cuts Thefts in Six Months But We help You Today

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
951-251-5155 email

 The FCC is announcing that they have decided to partner with the likes of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, t-mobile and other wireless carriers to create a national database to help thwart the theft of smartphones by making them all but unsellable after a theft.

Uh ... that's good, right?  

Sure it is when the newest smartphones cost upwards of $500 or more. 

But the real cost of smartphone loss is the loss of the data ... and the person stealing your phone may be only after the data ... and the new FCC smartphone database won't do anything to prevent a thief from stealing your phone if all they want is to steal your data.

 

Don't Wait for the Feds!  Here's How to Secure Your Phone Right Now...

1. Put a password on your phone.

Sure it's a hassle to type in the name of your Aunt's dog into your phone several times a day.  But how much more trouble would it be for your friends, relatives, enemies, competitors or the government to be able to access everything on your phone from the moment they "find" it until the moment you realize it's gone?

2. Make sure whatever's on your phone is already in the cloud.

Remember this Google+ commercial from awhile back about the dad who lost all his baby pictures because he lost his cell phone? Your phone (and your desktop computer for that matter) is not meant to be a secure storage device. It's meant to be a simple endpoint to collect data and then get it instantly to a safer place.

3. Use software that "finds your phone or fries your phone"

For as little as three bucks or as much as twenty bucks you can access any number of smartphone applications that can do as little as find a lost phone in vibrate mode, turn a phone into a coldwar-type spy device and/or turn your phone into a useless plastic brick.  GadgetTrak, SeekDroid and Webroot are just three of multiple companies that specialize in giving you control over lost phones.

Solution Review: How Distributed Enterprise IT Directors Solve 3G/4G Fixed Wireless Connectivity Problems

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
951-251-5155 email

 What's an IT director for a quick service restaurant ("QSR") or similar distributed enterprise company to do when the wide area network ("WAN") solution he or she wants to implement using a low cost DSL landline solution can only reach 80% of the companies locations?

Throw a 3G cellular AirCard in a wireless router, right?  Wrong.

An aircard in a router is probably the best solution if the business location is actually a recreational vehicle - contantly on the move. AirCards are great for mobile wireless data needs be far from perfect in a fixed office environment.  So how does an IT director solve the 3G/4G connectivity problems when trying to implement a fixed wireless solution?

Call on Accel Networks, the wireless data company that "tunes in" your wireless data signals with their unique proprietary antennae like no other wireless or landline company can.

If you've tried fixed wireless using AirCards for your data network locations unreachable by DSL and couldn't solve the connectivity problem, don't give up without calling your authorized Accel Networks solution partner.

 

How and Why is Accel Networks Solution Better than Everyone Else?

How does Accel do it better than all their competitors including AT&T, Verizon and Sprint?

Listen to Jonathan Forest, VP of Accel networks explain it himself in the following short recorded interview.

 

Listen to Recording:  Click Here to Download MP3

 

 

Read Transcript:   Click Here to Download PDF

How Quick Service Restaurant & Other Distributed Enterprise IT Directors Solve 3G/4G Fixed Wireless Connectivity Problems:

Accel Network's New Cellular Broadband Antenna

February 2012A Business Phone News conversation with Jonathan Forest, Vice President of Accel Networks, about how their new Maestro cellular broadband antenna system is gaining traction with CIOs and IT directors of many quick service restaurant chains and other similar multi-location retail businesses.

 

  DB:  So let's get right to the problems that QSR (“quick service restaurant”) IT directors have. They want to power the broadband needs of their retail stores with affordable 3G or 4G fixed wireless, but they're getting killed by connectivity problems.   

Question #1.   Please describe the nature and prevalence of the connectivity problems.

  JF:   Yes.   Specifically we see in our market that broadband is certainly the desire of many of the QSR and retail customer since it's a lower cost option, and it really fits their needs; however, broadband, DSL and cable isn't really prevalent in all locations, and we see consistently approximately 10% to 20% of the market not being covered for these customers, and that's where we fit in. 

Accel provides a high-grade, premium wireless solution that provides broadband type of service at these 10% to 20% locations, and that's with 3G.

With 4G coming out, and we're launching that next month, 4G speeds will, in many ways, surpass DSL.   So, the 4G solution that customers will be experiencing will be right on par, or superior to what they are experiencing, and we fully expect the wireless services to continue expanding.

 

  DB:  Question #2.    Can you describe how does Accel's proprietary fixed wireless Maestro antenna address the problem? 

  JF:     Yes.   I would be glad to.  If you had to boil it down, Accel provides the cleanest wireless signal.  What does that mean?  What it really means is that we're trying to minimize the carrier noise, and optimize the signal.  The result is better performance.    

2:11  Accel comes from this perspective, the wireless perspective.    We do not come at this from a landline perspective.   This is crucial, and the reason is that in landline technologies, the transport, DSL, cable, T1, it's a commodity.  No matter whether provider A or provider B is offering the solution, the same result is going to happen.   DSL, the same distance from the CO (phone company “central office”), it's all the same, and with wireless it couldn't be any different. 

Should You Backup Your Critical Business Data in "the Cloud"? Can you afford a cheap solution?

By Dan Baldwin
TA Executvie Director
951-251-5155 email 

As a telecom consultant and "VAR" (value added reseller), I'm always on the lookout for new technology solutions I can offer my business customers.

By examining everything that comes along, I'm also in a position to consult with my customers when they get an offer from someone else that seems way too good to be true -- like what appears to be an almost unlimited amount of cloud backup storage for next to nothing.

 

Who Does the Backup & How It's Tested is More Important than Price

I recently ran across an interesting opportunity to resell "unlimited" cloud backup storage to my business customers for just $59 per month.  Now this seems like a pretty killer deal at face value.  For just $59 per month I could give all my telecom consulting business clients "free data backup".

Or could I?

Hardrives "in the cloud" must be pretty cheap. I know this because big companies like Google sell me an extra 20 Gigs of storage a year for my Google Apps email storage for just $5 per year.

I'm pretty happy having 6 years and 60,000 old emails stored with Google because Google's a pretty big company and I'm fairly confident they know how to build and manage a data server farm. (And on top of that, backing up one user's email is fairly simple.)

But what about backing up "all the data" for "all your users"?

The biggest expense in cloud backup is not the cost of the actual hardrive sitting in a cloud somewhere.  The biggest expense is making sure a human that knows what they're doing is backing up your critical business data properly (and not overwriting good backups with bad backups) so that when you need to restore your data, your backup data set is not corrupted. 

 

So Who Are You Going to Trust?

While it appears that I can do it for you for practically free as we learned above, I'm thinking that

Will "Desktop-as-a-Service" or the "Virtual Desktop" Eliminate Your Need to Ever Buy Another Server?

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
951-251-5155 email

For over the past twenty years I've been a business consultant helping my clients with their telecom decisions. For the majority of these two decades that's meant choosing the best business phone system or the right local phone service provider.  For the past decade I've focused on helping my clients choose the right wide area data networks (WANs) like MPLS or metro Ethernet to connect multiple office locations across the country.

Now that many of my clients have robust data networks in place they are discovering that they no longer need to keep all their computer network servers in their own office spaces - often the most dangerous place for them to be.

With ample bandwidth and network security in place, many of my clients are looking to place their application critical servers in a public or private colocation or data center facility that better protects the servers from a multitude of dangers.

Still other clients are looking to entirely eliminate their

Verizon's "Premium Technical Support" Service Solves Computer Problems for Your "Work at Home" Employees

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
951-251-5155 email

As more and more businesses allow their employees to "work at home" out of necessity or convenience, more and more businesses are discovering the pain and expense of providing their remote workers with decent computer "help-desk" support.

In order to keep their FiOS residential customers from switching to their cable Internet competitors, Verizon is offering their "Premium Technical Support" service to any FiOS residential customer that needs "help desk" computer PC support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

 

Unlimited PC & Mac "Help Desk" Support 24/7 for Under $15 per Month

This is an absolute screaming deal for any business with a "work at home" employee that they need to provide PC help desk support for. I actually signed up for