NOTE: Since this post was originally created, Dropbox experienced a serious security issue for a small amount (less than 1%) of users.  The issue has been addressed and corrected.
Full details can be found here.

With one of the questions on our yearly Customer Satisfaction Survey we asked our customers for suggestions for blog topics that they’d like to read about.  Several customers indicated they’d like to know more about “The Cloud” and specifically applications such as Dropbox.  You asked for it and here it is!

(While this may sound like a commercial for Dropbox, I assure you that Acroment is not getting compensated in any way for this post.  In addition, I only review products that I’ve used.)

Dropbox is an application that allows you to access your files from multiple computers, devices (such as your smart phone) and websites.  You no longer have to email files to yourself, carry a jump drive or portable hard drive or have multiple copies of a file.  Sounds pretty good right?  Wait… it gets better.  It’s completely FREE.   Read the rest of this entry

If you are like me, you have your social media accounts like LinkedIn and Facebook set to send you an email message when you receive a notification or message on the website. For example, a new friend request from Facebook would appear as an email on my gmail account.

Included in these email messages are links back to the social media site to visit the request.

My Tip: Don’t click on those links!

Read the rest of this entry

The concept of “social media” is a difficult one for some folks to grasp.  My wife (who up until recently wasn’t even part of the Facebook crowd) tells me all the time that I’m wasting my time with this stuff.

• Tweeting? Who cares… no one’s reading your stuff…
• Facebook? It’s nothing but noise…
• Blogging? Why are you keeping an online diary that no one reads?

I’ll admit that sometimes it’s pretty difficult to determine that VALUE of social networking (especially from a business perspective) but I recently had 3 concrete example of social media at work that I wanted to share. Read the rest of this entry

So you’re on Facebook and you’ve taken the plunge and even signed up for a Twitter account.  You’re feeling good about yourself that you’re finally all caught up with this “social media” craze.  But then you start to see your online friends “checking in”.  You see “Places” in your iPhone Facebook app.  Should you be doing it?  Are there security and privacy concerns?  What does it all mean?

The two main players in this location based social media are Foursquare and Facebook Places.  Note there are location based services in just about every application you’re using these days from Twitter to Flickr but this post is focusing on these two “big” players. Read the rest of this entry

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