Tag: Business Technology Minneapolis

5 technical upgrades that will save your company time and money in 2013

Is your company living in the 1990’s in regards to technology? It might be if you are reading this and if you are…you are not alone. We see this almost on a daily basis with our clients. Once a client calls in for a minor computer issue, we insure to interview all business clients and find out that most if not all are missing the boat on what they could be doing in regards to getting onboard with new technology. Let’s review the big list and you can see where your company is falling short.

Professional email account (Not Susiescookies@yahoo.com). If you are living off of free email accounts for your business, it’s time to put down a few bucks and get that website as well and get your company into the land of other companies. Comcast accounts don’t count either, those are about just as bad. From a technical point of view, you are paying for that account, but it doesn’t count. Put up the money and get your business aligned right in email and website branding. Buying domains (the company name.com) is super cheap and it usually comes with an email account, so the cost at this point is mute. To find out if your company name is available and get pricing click here.

Company Email Ok, so let’s say you’re in the clear and have your own domain and you’re all set with company email. But…you are finding you’re having issues in a few other ways. Your smartphone isn’t synching right or you’re having problems with your contacts and calendar not working, or even worse…you’re still on Pop3 (very old). You have 2-3 choices on how to change up how your email works, some are fairly cheap and some are a bit more costly, but worth the money.

• Your first choice is if you are a one person show, you can move to IMAP for just a few bucks probably. IMAP will allow your email to synchronize over two or more devices.
• If you have a team of employees, put down the money and get into Google Apps or Hosted Exchange. Google apps pricing is better for just one person at $5 a month (you can still use Outlook for email/calendar/contacts) or you can stay with Microsoft and use their Hosted Exchange for a price of about $15 a month (Sale right now with GoDaddy) and you get a free copy of Outlook 2010 (valued at $139) so this is a great deal if you’re buying for three people. To check out GoDaddy’s pricing for mailboxes click here.

File Sharing One of the biggest headaches for any small company. Stop the emailing of documents back and forth to each other and stop worrying about what version of the document is recent, start using Dropbox for your team. The free version is a great tester for you to see if you can utilize it well, but most people and companies can…so you will want to upgrade to the large space and use it for everything, like we do at Call That Girl. Click here to try Dropbox for free. It’s definately a game changer!

Company chat & communications If your company is now texting each other on their personal cell phones to talk faster, it’s a sign you need Google Chat. This tool from Google is nice, and you can install it on your smartphones for those that do need to chat on their phones. You can also send files and keep up on who’s doing what. Simply put, you can control what your employees are chatting about with this over texting. Creating company accounts on Google or using Google apps are just two ways to set it up.

Online backup we saved the best for last of course! Those little scary words “backup” usually catch a client stopping short. If you do not have a backup plan in place, please call us. We can help you make affordable choices here. If you have one, but are not sure if it’s working, please call us, we can help verify that those boxes you had intalled years ago are working still or how they are backing up. Worse…if you have nothing in place, now is the time!

If you would like a free consultation, please email me at lisa@callthatgirl.biz or call in 612-865-4475 to get on my calendar. I can create a simple proposal for you or your team for a one time setup. The only reoccuring costs you will have is the products on a yearly basis.

Lisa