As reported yesterday, HP (http://www.hp.com/) has announced their intent to exit the personal computer Business.  This move comes as the company struggles to stay relevant in the ever dynamic consumer products marketplace.

For years, HP has attempted to build upon its successful printer business by acquiring other consumer product companies such as Compaq and (most recently) Palm.  The move to now exit those businesses is a win for Apple computer with its hugely successful iPhone and iPad products which have been competing with HP’s Palm Pre and the just released HP TouchPad.  Another big winner is Dell who is already the leading PC manufacturer.  Based on HP’s exit, Dell can only expect to continue to  gain market share. Read the rest of this entry

Educating your employees on how to effectively use the computer software and hardware tools you provide for them should be important to all business owners… especially small business owners.  However, it often goes overlooked.  Not because of the cost of classroom education, but because of the labor costs associated with having your employees out of the office for dedicated study.  In a typical classroom setting, there are students of different skill levels who all learn differently with individual rates of absorption.  From my experience, when employers invest in classroom training, the students only retain about 20% of the material covered.  Worse yet, they completely forget the material they don’t immediately apply.  Additionally, take into account that classes are designed to cover a narrow scope of concepts so that they appeal to a broad audience.  All things considered, the opportunity cost of an employee out of the office becomes a much higher expense than the class itself. Read the rest of this entry

I recently ran across this article on smallbiztechnology.com and wanted to pass it along:

Microsoft and Google: 3 Misconceptions That Microsoft Wants You To Know About

The article is certainly biased (It’s written by Microsoft Product Manager, Bhavika Thakkar) but I think it highlights some differences that business owners really need to consider when moving ANY of their services to the cloud.

In my experience, no other email server works as well or is as powerful as Microsoft Exchange Server. While you may be using Microsoft Office Outlook to connect to other email servers (POP or IMAP servers for example) there are a lot of back end features of Outlook which are not unlocked unless you have your mailbox on an Exchange Server (as many of our customers do).

The information in this article isn’t news to me.  However, it does help highlight some of the risks you take when evaluating a move to hosted services.

For some additional reading on “The Cloud” see below:

• Can You Rely On The Cloud For Your Business?
• Ease Into “The Cloud” With Dropbox

Are you using Cloud services for your business?

If so which ones and what’s been your experience?

In the 7 years I’ve been selling our services, I can tell you the number one reason why companies switch to Acroment is because their current IT provider doesn’t call them back.  The first operational rule for any service business: be available to your customers.  If you’re going to provide a service in the first place why WOULDN’T you want to make yourself available?

We do not hide from our clients.  Ever.  We don’t hide behind email, voice mail or a contact form on our website.  I don’t have to look at our financials to know that we spend $2,500-3,000 per month on communication tools so that we are accessible to our clients.  All of our engineers have email enabled smart-phones. Our office phones, forward to our mobile phones. All voice mail messages are forwarded to our email. Why do we utilize this technology?  Quite simply so that our clients can reach us any day any time.  Even when employees are out of the office or on vacation, have the people in place to pick up the slack. Read the rest of this entry

Hot off the Internet are the results of our first annual customer satisfaction survey. Thank you for everyone who participated. The time you spent filling out the survey meant a lot to all of us and it gives us a great place to start towards making improvements.

Without further ado Here are the results:

We had a total of 63 responses out of a possible 500 overall just 12.6% of our clients filled out the survey. I hope that we can improve that number over time.

Question: Are you aware that Acroment Technologies provides IT/computer services to your company (do you know us by our company name)?

• Yes: 100%
• No: 0%

This is great news: the people that we work with know our brand!

Question: How often do you have “computer problems” in any given month?

• Less than once per month: 49.2%
• More than once per month, but less than three: 31.7%
• More than three times each month: 19.0%

These results are a bit surprising to me.  I was hoping that our clients would have fewer problems, but I am glad that most respondents said they have less than 1 problem per month.

Generally speaking, do you feel that the majority of computer problems you have are caused by:

• The computer (hardware): 23.8%
• Windows (in general): 11.1%
• Other software: 15.9%
• The Network (other systems you connect to/with): 42.9%
• Acroment (we cause the problems): 0%
• The user (lack of training or understanding): 1.6%
• It is so rare that I have a problem, I don’t know: 4.8%

As I watched the responses come in, “Computer hardware” had an early lead but “The Network” came on strong and ended up running away with it.  I’m very thankful that there isn’t a perception amongst our clients that we’re the cause of their problems.  Speaking of perception, this question tells me that we need to work on educating our clients on the issues that they are dealing with.  The concept of “The Network” simply means too many things to different people.

Read the rest of this entry