Company Identity

I often see nice business cards that include email addresses that read:

username@msn.com or username@yahoo.com or username@bellsouth.net ....

The list of options goes on and on; but you get my drift. To make things worse, I SOMETIMES see cards that contain the address of a legitimate web site with one of the email addresses I mentioned above.

I'm convinced that an established and consistent company image is one of the most important (and, incidentally least expensive) things a company can do. Keeping your company name in front of the public is an essential element of doing business.

Of course, we recommend that almost all companies have a domain name that represents that company's name and, if possible, some representation of what the company does. In most instances, we recommend that a web site be incorporated into the overall marketing strategy.

Whether or not there's a web site, we recommend that companies have name centric email addresses (e.g., username@companydomainname.com) and NEVER -- absolutely NEVER have business email hosted at AOL with email addresses of username@AOL.com.

Talk to us at JFSI for more information about how we can help you with these efforts.

A disturbing reality

I've been following with great interest news reports that project that for the next two years recipients of Social Security Benefits will see no Cost Of Living Adjustment (COLA).

The same articles articulate in great detail the fact that medical expenses, typically the largest expense imposed on seniors, and Medicare and Medigap premiums are likely to rise sharply. Since these premium amounts are typically deducted from the recipient's monthly check, the net effect is that for the first time in over three decades, the amount received montly will GO DOWN.

Let's see if the birds on the hill who sit on chambers of our legislature take a commensurate cut.

Windows 7 Test Results

We have been doing some pretty extensive testing of Windows 7 since Microsoft released the "production" version to the partners web portal.

We have several test scenarios that I'll describe here.

Scenario 1. Microsoft has said that hardware minimums required for W7 are a 1+ gigahertz processor and 1 gig of memory. We tried to "stretch" that envelope; so we installed W7 Professional on a DELL 4300 with a 1.5 gigahertz processor and 512 MB of memory. We were, quite frankly, suprised that it would even install; but it did and it's running at least as well as XP on the same machine. Of course, we'd NEVER have tried to load Vista on that platform.

We expected to run into problems with the network adapter and the video card. Then we realized that we had long ago replaced the NIC that shipped with the machine with a Netgear adapter that W7 recognized right away and had no problems with.

We had to go to the NVIDIA web site and download video drivers in order to get an acceptable video presentation.

We've run a fair number of programs, including the Office 7 suite and GoToMeeting on the box and so far so good.

Scenario 2. Install W7 Professional on an XP based HP Notebook. The drill was essentailly the same as with the DELL except that the laptop had plenty of memory and is performing better. The install did NOT recognize the Intel Wireless; and getting it installed and configured was a reasonably difficult chore; but once we got over that hump things look OK.

Scenario 3. Install on a new clean machine with an AMD Dual Core processor and 4MB memory. Everything went swimmingly.

Problems...... We had to DOWNLOAD the two versions of W7. It took two tries to get a successful download of W7 Professional and the copy of Ultra downlaoded with errors and will not install. This is a MAJOR problem because of the size of the product and the time it takes to download even on our Time Warner Road Runner Turbo connection.

Email Alternative We Give An A+

Had someone suggested even a few months ago that I would be writing this post, I would have said they were crazy and recommended a thorough mental evaluation. That was back during the days when a product not produced by Microsoft was unheard of in our repetoire of products.

JFSI has from day one run Microsoft Small Business Server and Microsoft Exchange. We liked it so much that we never even considered alternatives; and many of our clients are prety much in the same boat.

Don't get me wrong -- Exchange is a great product. For medium to large sized companies it still has no equal.

A few months ago, a friend and I were talking about the concepts of "Software as a Service (SaaS)". You've undoubtedly heard about it and the whole idea behind "cloud computing".

During this conversation, my friend mentioned that they were evaluating Google's suite of applications called "Google Apps".

The conversation intrigued me to the point where I started doing some research; and that research led me to beta test the product in our environment. To make this long story endless, we liked what we saw so much that we dumped Exchange for Google Apps.

You ask -- WHY?

• We were initally concerned that Google Apps' email was nothing more than GMail. While it has a lot of the characteristics of GMail, it's different; it's secure; it's reliable; it's fast; it's avaialble from any computer with an Internect connection and I like it better than Outlook Web Access (OWA).
• JFSI is in business to support small to medium sized companies -- not medium to large to mega sized ones. An Exchange environment can be very expensive.
• We were initally concerned that we'd lose the ability to access our mail through our much loved, tried and true Outlook client; but that concern was short lived because Outlook works fine with the applications
• We LOVE the fact that multiple users can simultaneously work on the same document, see changes each user makes and know that the application is doing document versioning and keeping track of who does what
• We LOVE the fact that the applications seamlessly synch with our Blackberrys through the air, eliminating the need to tether them to a PC in the office or spend the money to install Blackberry Enterprise Server software
• We LOVE the price -- $50.00 per user per year for a 25GB storage space
• During the last month, we've caught one message in our spam folder that should have been in our Inbox
• While we have not done a lot with it yet, the Intranet services included in the applications seems to rival those provided by SharePoint Services.

Send me an email or give me a call if you'd like more information about our experiences.