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

In the last few days, I have received this email to alert me of a critical Microsoft Outlook update.

If you have received this email, or one like it, DO NOT CLICK THE LINK IN THIS EMAIL!

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Most of my interaction today with the blackberry storm was related to its (mostly not) syncing  with BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES).

I’ve installed BES over a dozen times and it never seems to work the first time. I’m glad to report that I was able to finally get it working for me after spending about 2-3 hours working on it (off and on).

Details about our BES setup: Server A – Dell PowerEdge 2950, Win 2K3 x64, Exchange 2007 and SQL 2005 Server B – Dell PowerEdge 2650, Wink 2k3, BlackBerry Enterprise Server 4.1.4

The BES was installed on a different server within our environment (a new configuration for me). This required that Microsoft Exchange Server MAPI Client and Collaboration Data Objects 1.2.1 be installed along with Exchange Server Management Tools. After some trial and error with mailbox and service account permissions, I was finally able to get my phone to accept a wireless enterprise activation.

Thanks in part to this excellent post about troubleshooting Enterprise Activation issues.

I don’t like the way that the Storm is displaying my email and other messages. All messages go into one place (Text, MMS, Exchange). I prefer that different types of messages go into different buckets. I will need to do more research on this. Also, attachments are still not working properly. I am going to try and resolve that problem tomorrow along with the ability to read emails as HTML.