Ann Arbor: if you haven’t heard, there’s a big city out there! The bus that Dynamic Edge sponsored to take people down town Detroit to the Crain’s house party was a success. We toured a number of houses, had some great food and just a little too much fun.
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Supporting a business’s computer system is a tough gig. It takes a lot of hard work, patience, knowledge about technology, and THE RIGHT PEOPLE! Here’s a quick note from one of our new clients. Cheers to having a great team of people!
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Do you use SharePoint at your company? Did you know that if you own a Windows Server, you already have it? Many businesses do not know they own this powerful collaboration tool. Here are 5 things you can use SharePoint for at your office to be more productive:
- Use it to document and manage a process. A really popular use for this is Human Resources, keeping track of the steps and documents required for hiring and training new employees.
- Having trouble finding documentation for a procedure, a specific hiring form or marketing post card? Use a document library to help your team organize and ultimately find the documents your business needs to run. After you upload the document, your team can use the search function to quickly locate them for future use!
- Create announcements to keep your team up to date. At Dynamic Edge we use these to let everyone on our team know when we have a happy customer.
- Manage project tasks. Using SharePoint to keep track of tasks in a project is easy and effective. Tracking tasks and their completion in one central spot allows your team to keep score as they are working through large projects and keeps everyone on the same page regarding project completion.
- Track your company contacts using a contact list. At Dynamic Edge, we use contact lists to manage our marketing campaigns and our customer surveys.
Just met with the CEO of one of our new customers. As she explained to me why she decided to ditch her old vendor to move to our Fixed IT program, it occurred to me the tremendous amount of time she was actually saving herself.
You see, before Fixed IT, she would be charged hourly by her old vendor to contact manufacturers to solve warranty problems. Because of this charge (she got an invoice for over $400 to schedule Dell out to replace the screen in a laptop last year), she decided to have her team call for warranty issues. What she quickly found out was: “It took hours for my people to get to someone who could tell them what is wrong. Then, after we reached the right person in technical support, our people would be told that it was really another vendor’s issue. So we would start the entire process all over with the next vendor. Now, with Fixed IT, our people have one number to call.”
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We were recently contracted by an architecture firm to restore their server after its Exchange database and Active Directory became corrupted. After looking over their bill (almost $4,000) I thought I would share with you the 2 critical mistakes that lead to their server outage, contributed to this company’s downtime (two days) and, ultimately, this unnecessary cost. Imagine being without your email, schedule, and critical files for two whole days!
1. Your Server Needs Correctly Configured Battery Backup. The corruption was caused when the server was not properly shutdown during a power outage. A simple uninterruptable power supply (UPS) configured to shut the server down would have prevented this entire issue. We often find that small businesses don’t invest in these devices or don’t set them up to shutdown the actual server. Most people think of their UPS as a battery to just keep their server running when the power goes out, but the issue is what happens when the battery runs out of juice. One of the major purposes of the device is to keep your server from an abrupt loss of power during a disk write, which causes data corruption like this in the first place.
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On Tuesday night the Dynamic Edge team took a break from server administration, computer support, and programming to get back to the basics. In this case, I am talking about the game we all spent our lunches and bus rides playing: Euchre. The competition was cut throat as there were prizes for first and last place.
As you can see from one of my many awesome hands, Bruce didn’t take first place at this year’s Euchre tournament. Jason Tomsic received the $50 Best Buy gift certificate for first place…and…ummm…yeah…Skyler Willett took home the $5 McDonalds bucks for last place.
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