The fact that you are reading this means that you have survived the two years of recession so far. While many of the economists are predicting improvement in 2010, they also say it is likely that many industries will lag behind in any general economic recovery.

Perhaps your business has bucked the trend and is looking at a good backlog going into 2010. If so, congratulations. For the rest of you, 2010 will continue to be a year of scrambling to find work and looking to cut costs wherever you can.

You may have already reduced costs in 2009. Since our mission has always been about helping our clients achieve efficiency through the appropriate use of technology, that's how we started our 2010 planning -- Figuring out how we could help you save money by utilizing technology to be more efficient.

With that in mind, we have developed some new value-added products that we believe will help make you more efficient, save money, or both. Read on, those new products are listed below.

Efficiency will be the name of the game for businesses in 2010. Talk to us about the specific technology efficiencies that exist for your business.  

SharePoint. With staff already stretched thin, the need for faster response to opportunities, and project management on thin margin projects a must, this tool can help. Implemented correctly, it will cut down on wasted time finding and organizing project documents and other information that you need to run your business.

A collection of web-based products and software, Microsoft SharePoint includes web browser collaboration, streamlines process management, provides more efficient search methods and offers a more "user-friendly" platform in document management.

SharePoint is offered by Microsoft as a free download, although you will need to have a server that meets minimum requirements (most do). You can download it and with a little of our help, get it up and running. Once you have learned it, it is easy to maintain and expand its use on your own.

SharePoint interfaces with many applications you may already own, including Microsoft Office. We will have a interface available for SharePoint for our ComputerEase customers by the end of the first quarter.  ^back to top

Network Maintenance
A great way to reduce your technology spending is to invest in maintaining your equipment. Just as your vehicles and other equipment need regular servicing to avoid major repairs, your computer server, workstations, and the software they run on need the same thing.

We have developed several programs to provide regular maintenance of your entire network for a minimal monthly cost. Most of these programs include a low cost service that monitors key components of your network, so that potential problems can be addressed before they become major problems causing expensive downtime.  ^back to top

Remote Back Up
Without fail, we consistently have clients that need help restoring from backups -- only to find that the backup has not been working lately, sometimes for several weeks or even months. The cost to manually rekey data is very high, usually weighed against the even higher cost of attempting to salvage data from a damaged disk drive.

We are still strong advocates of tape-driven backup, but we understand that tape systems have many weaknesses, including old tape media, equipment failure and human error. Because of the many potential flaws, we now offer online backup services. Your data, or specified subset of mission critical data, can be securely backed up to our backup servers at a very low monthly cost, without any user intervention required.  ^back to top

Training
The worst time to cut back on sales and marketing costs is during a recession. The same holds true for training. The cost of training pales in comparison to the inefficiency of users not utilizing the systems you have invested in. What are they doing instead? Rekeying data into spreadsheets, comparing the spreadsheet to the data that is already in the system, reconciling it, revising, etc. Or just as bad, they are making decisions without data that could be easily obtained, if only they knew.

We will be providing a much more extensive set of training programs in 2010, from beginners classes for your new hires who have so far only learned by word of mouth, to advanced classes on project management and other advanced topics.  ^back to top

Your Web Site
I've been talking frequently to industry groups about the necessity of reaching the 30 and under generation via the Internet. If any part of your business sells to younger buyers and you don't have a significant web site presence, you are making sales growth more difficult. If you have a web site, but have not updated it in several years, you're probably not getting the results from it you should expect.

We have been doing web development, and search engine optimization, for more than 10 years. What we are adding this year is a set of web templates that can be easily installed and customized for your business. We can make adding or updating your web site an easy process.

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