Microsoft Office 2010 Release

Microsoft Office 2010 is in the house! Is anyone as excited about this new product as I am? Yes, maybe it is because I’m a tech nerd or maybe because its super awesome!

Update

If you are a Volume License customer with active Software Assurance (SA) on Microsoft Office, SharePoint, Visio and Project products, you will be one of the first to receive the 2010 set of products. You will be able to download the products in English via the Volume Licensing Service Center starting April 27. If you are not an active SA customer, you will be able to purchase the new 2010 products through Volume Licensing from your Microsoft partner starting May 1. 

Here are some cool new features 2010 has to offer:

-Outlook 2010 QuickSteps helps you get through your inbox faster.

-Web Apps
You now have the ability to access and work on your office files through a browser. Send a work file via a link instead of an attachment.

-Excel Web App
Excel on the web offers the right subset with the right functionality.

-Word 2010
One master file everyone can edit. Now editing has become more of a social and not isolating process.

To Outsource or Not to Outsource: That Is the Question.

In this economy, outsourcing is all the rage. Try Googling “outsourcing” and see how many results appear. A lot, right? But why are so many companies jumping on the outsource train? Well the answer is quite simple: its more cost-effective. However, even though outsourcing may not be draining your bank account, there is one thing you are losing and that is control. The ability to control all aspects of your business, which back in the 1990′s would all be under one roof. So the question remains, which parts of your business can be outsourced and which parts should remain in-house?

For example, say your core business is a wedding planning business and you wanted to design a website that allowed your customers to view your most current work. You could design your own company logo and website, but the differences in the end result between doing it yourself and hiring a professional can be significant. Therefore, outsourcing allows you the time to focus on your business and not become an expert in someone else’s.

However, there are some aspects of your business that you should not outsource and you should be monitoring at all times! These include cash-flow management and, in many cases, customer interaction.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of outsourcing is its ability to save you money. For example, many companies are beginning to outsource their IT services  (help desk, computer support and maintenance), and pay significantly less than hiring a full-time IT person to give the same level of support. If IT is not in your core business, outsourcing this could save you time, instead of racking through technology blogs and calling manufacturer help desks to troubleshoot your problem.

Although outsourcing has many advantages, there is one disadvantage that seems to deter many businesses: you are putting part of your company in someone else’s hands. Losing control of some aspects of your business can be a scary process. Trust is the biggest part of an outsourced business relationship, which is why if you are going to outsource any part of your business you should these guidelines in order to find the best company possible for your project.

Helpful Steps to Outsourcing:

1.) Do your research.

Look for online reviews about this company. Whether it be on Yelp or an industry-specific review website, make sure people are saying good things about the company’s services.

2.) Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.

Call a few vendors, not just one. Get a feel for the industry rate for their specific service. Price does matter, but doing the job well matters more, especially when the job is outsourced. You don’t have time to find a new vendor every month.

3.) Get a thorough quote.

When they give you a quote, make sure that each part of their service is broken down. You want to know what you’re paying for.

4.) Call their clients.

See what their clients have to say about their work, their professionalism and turnaround time.

5.) Meet with the company in person.

You may get a good vibe on the phone, but just like any relationship, you want to make sure that you can work well with them. Because afterall, it is your busines and your reputation in their hands.

Good luck & happy outsourcing!

How to Help Your Small Business Save Money

In this day and age, companies are trying to save money on everything from shipping costs and mailing lists to energy and payroll expenses. Similar to your company, PC Professional is also a small, single-owner business in downtown Oakland that knows a lot about saving money and staying operational since 1981. With looming rumors of the recession on the up and up, if there is anything we have learned in this recession, it is to save money and keep costs down. Here is a list of a few ideas that can help your company save money and still remain efficient in 2010:

1. Energy-efficient technology will save you money over the life span of your computers, printers and other tech tools.
2. Don’t scrimp on IT disaster-recovery planning. It’s cheaper to invest now than to wait until there’s an issue.
3. Reduce the number of phone lines. Configure your office computers to send and receive faxes. Windows XP and Windows Small Business Server both make it easy to set up fax services.
4. Reassess your phone plan. Even if you don’t want to switch to a voice over IP system, you can get service for cents per minute depending on your call volume.
5. Eliminate unnecessary lighting. Install motion detectors to control lighting in frequently unoccupied areas, such as restrooms and copy rooms.
6. Turn off equipment when it’s not being used. This can reduce energy consumption by up to 25 percent as well as turning off your office computers at the end of the day can save an additional 50 percent.
7. Share printers. If you purchase and maintain multiple printers at your office, you can save money by setting up a network that allows employees to share devices. For example, Microsoft Windows Small Business Server allows you to share printers and create a more secure and productive computing environment.
8. Hire college students or interns for credit. An internship program is a win-win situation for your business. You get bright, young and ambitious employees to do your dirty work for little or no pay.
9. Plan shipping or mailings. You can schedule your shipping, mailings or deliveries to take advantage of bulk transactions.
10. Eliminate unnecessary paper waste. Implement paper-reducing strategies such as double-sided printing and reusing paper. Save the trees!
11. Clean up your mailing list. The U.S. Postal Service will clean up your mailing list for free, correcting addresses, noting incomplete addresses and adding ZIP+4 numbers so you’ll be eligible for bar-code discounts.
12. Re-evaluate your insurance coverage and policy costs. Ask your provider about an umbrella policy, which can be cheaper.

Is Your Email Heading Up to the Cloud?

In an era where even the most routine technology purchases are coming under heavy scrutiny, it’s no surprise that cost saving services like cloud computing are dominating the headlines. The lure of the cloud is two-fold: software acquisition and system administration cost reduction. While some organizations are still hesitant to store sensitive data on the cloud, one area in which many have taken the plunge, is email services. You have the option of outsourcing the entire service, or using the cloud for specific product type applications like inbound anti-virus and anti-spam filtering. Recent estimates suggest that spam accounts for over 90% of all email. And the trend doesn’t seem to be reversing. Managing the required scanning, remediation and updating are resource intensive activities, often warranting dedicated servers and staff. Transferring this activity to the cloud, frees enterprises to focus more on tasks that are critical to their business. But as with all solutions, there are advantages and disadvantages to this approach.

Pros

Cost Savings – Having your hosting provider do anti-spam service means one less piece of software that you’ll need to purchase, support and administer. Network Traffic – Imagine a network free of millions of pieces of unwanted email. Increased bandwidth means your internal systems can more quickly respond to customer requests. Increased Security – Off-site spam and virus filtering reduces the chance of virus tainted email reaching and infecting enterprise networks. The result? Minimized potential for data loss and downtime.

Cons

Performance – Some users might note a performance degradation when using cloud based solutions do to any internet connection slowdowns. This is a minor annoyance for some, but could be an issue. Software Conflicts – As the anti-spam solution will just solve one area of your network security concerns, most companies will still need to run other software like firewalls that may conflict with the cloud service.

Conclusion

Even considering the challenges, for many organizations, outsourcing email anti-spam services warrants further investigation. However, enterprise level change should of course be undertaken with caution. Solid research, testing and trials go a long way toward ensuring a successful implementation. There are hosted email security solutions like GFI MAX MailProtection that gives you a free 30-day trial so you can try the product completely risk free. Setting up is a breeze and with very low running costs.

5 Essential Services Your Managed IT Provider Should Be Giving You

When looking for a managed IT service provider, its best to first understand what you are looking for. Does your system hold client data? Are you continuously getting viruses that affect your business and cause downtime? Some companies are turning to managed IT providers for support on these issues. However, when looking for a managed IT provider, there are 5 key services that you should be getting:

1.) Real-time Monitoring and Detecting

Outside threats such as hackers and malware can harm your company’s sensitive data. With a managed IT service provider, an intrusion detection system will already be in place, so any breaches of security will send out an alert immediately. An intrusion detection system will identify, track and report on any issues affecting your IT. With a full analysis of these alerts, performance benchmarks and security issues, your managed IT provider can provide preventative maintenance on these issues.

2.) Preventative Maintenance

Preventative maintenance is crucial for minimizing your company’s downtime because as we are all aware, downtime equals more cost for your company. Preventative maintenance ranges from security patches for your desktops and servers, identification of failed or missing security patches as well as  server health checks.

3.) Email Filtering

There are many tricks to breaking into a company’s network, especially through email. Many businesses are being affected by simply clicking their mouse through spam, a link with a virus attached or spyware. Most email filters will remove spam and computer viruses based on the criteria set up by the user. However, most managed IT service providers can set up rules and regulations for your business email, which requires no implementation or maintenance time to you or your users.

4.) Application Performance Management

Making sure your business applications are running at maximum capacity is critical when it comes to running your company efficiently. An application performance management system focuses on monitoring and managing performance and service availability of software applications that your company is running. By having a managed IT provider, your overall program performance will improve  and your company’s downtime will be reduced.

5.) Vulnerability Assessment

Knowing where your business’ weaknesses are is crucial. What a vulnerability assessment does is identifies, qualifies and ranks your business system’s vulnerabilities. Your risk will be reduced with the detection of security holes, monitoring of viruses, worms and spam ware as well as automated verification of data backup completion and identification of any failed backups. If your business deals with IT, communication or client-based services, having the ability to detect these vulnerabilities within your system is vital for your company’s overall security.

Thank You for Attending PC Professional’s Catch a Wave Seminar Series 2010

With over 40 attendees, I can proudly say that PC Professional’s Catch a Wave Seminar Series 2010 was a success! Seminar presentations by Kirkland Jue, Microsoft SharePoint expert, Mark McClure, Microsoft virtualization specialist from Synnex and Sunil Patil from the HP P4000 product team, allowed attendees to get a first-hand look at Microsoft’s & HP’s new and cool technologies.

Registration began promptly at 9:30 am with a rush of attendees traveling from San Francisco, Alameda and other surrounding Bay Area cities. Attendees were greeted with a PC Pro goodie bag, which included a 4GB flash drive, PC Pro notebook & golden coin chocolate. If the chocolate wasn’t enough to obtain a sugar high, doughnuts and coffee were also provided from Henry’s Cafe.

Following registration, Track 1: SharePoint 2010, kicked off with an enthusiatic/passionate/humorous presentation by Microsoft SharePoint expert, Kirkland Jue. To be honest, I don’t think I have ever seen someone make SharePoint this exciting! Not only did Kirkland present why SharePoint rocks, but also how any small/medium business can use it in their business process. Incorporating demos throughout his presentation made his points come alive and I am sure most of us were asking ourselves, “gosh, why am I not using this technology?”. I would have to say my favorite SharePoint 2010 feature Kirkland demonstrated would have to be the voicemail feature where your voicemails appear in an email. I can’t tell you how much time I spend sorting through which voicemails are high priority and which are not.

After an hour presentation on SharePoint 2010, Track 2: Microsoft Hyper-V directly followed. Mark McClure, a Microsoft virtualization specialist, stepped onto the stage with a compelling presentation on Microsoft Hyper-V. Mark began his presentation with one simple question: why virtualization? I know that many companies might steer away from virtualization because they do not understand it. Mark McClure addressed this by taking a deep dive into what virtualization is and what it means for your company. Simply put: IT efficiency, energy saving and cost saving. Mark then touched on what Microsoft’s virtualization strategy is  and what sets them apart from their other competitors, price being one of the main differentiators. In my opinion, the main takeaway from Mark’s presentation is that virtualization isn’t going away and it is something that businesses must understand in order to continue to run their IT department efficiently while simultaneously cutting costs.

At noon, the Networking Lunch began with ravioli, salad and sandwiches from Genova, italian delicatessen. Attendees had a chance to mingle with each other as well as with our speakers from Microsoft and HP. After 45 minutes of networking, lunch concluded with an attendee raffle which included Windows 7 software, Microsoft t-shirts, pens and mugs.

Lastly, our Catch a Wave Seminar Series 2010 Seminar concluded with a final presentation from the HP P4000 product team. Sunil Patel, an HP solutions architect, added to our virtualization theme by discussing what HP products are used in a virtualized environment. After Mark McClure’s deep dive into virtualization, Sunil Patel, addressed HP’s converged infrastructure used to optimize your IT environment, reduce your cost of storage networking, reduce the impact of data growth and reduce energy use with the HP Data Center Smart Grid. Sunil also discussed today’s challenges when it comes to virtualizing your  systems. For example, with a virtualized environment there are new storage requirements, which some storage vendors do not address appropriately with a one-size-fits-all approach.

After a long day of Microsoft SharePoint, Hyper-V and HP storage solutions, our Catch a Wave Seminar Series 2010 concluded with a thank you to our sponsors, Microsoft & HP, along with a thank you to all of our attendees.

Once again if you attended PC Professional’s Catch a Wave Seminar Series 2010, thank you! And if you missed us, we hope to see you again at our next event!

Why Companies Are Building Solutions to Integrate Within SharePoint 2010

With Microsoft solutions moving from your desktop to the cloud, many companies are beginning to see the importance of developing solutions that can be integrated into Microsoft SharePoint. The reason: businesses rely on Microsoft solutions no matter what.

At VoiceCon earlier this week, Polycom, the global leader in video and voice solutions, announced its growing relationship with Microsoft in order to create solutions to enable more effective collaboration amongst Microsoft customers. Thus far, Polycom is the only company that offers solutions surrounding voice, video and application integration within Microsoft SharePoint.

One solution in particular, will make it easier for users to publish, manage and view video media content securely. It will also offer the capabilities of the Polycom Video Media Center (VMC) 1000, which is a complete video content management system that links video conferencing and video streaming all from the Microsoft SharePoint server. The Polycom Video Media Center (VMC) can capture video conferences, training sessions, lectures and can also enable packaging with documents, presentations and other additional data.

“Microsoft is clearly a leader in delivering Unified Communications. Our expanded partnership will benefit our customers by allowing them to leverage their existing UC environments and protect their long-term investments in technologies such as Communications Server, Exchange Server, Outlook and other key Microsoft business applications,” said Jim Kruger, Polycom’s Vice President of Solution Product Marketing.

Right now, many small businesses question Microsoft SharePoint as a viable solution for their business. However, SharePoint is designed to be the center hub of any company. With an increase in SharePoint solutions, more companies will find Sharepoint to be a necessity and not a luxury to their business.

Whether your employees are working from your main office, video conferencing from their home office or listening to an in-office training session on the road, SharePoint has the capability to manage all three, simultaneously.

So what was that again about how you didn’t have time for yourself? Yeah, that’s what we thought.

To hear more about SharePoint 2010, attend PC Professional’s Catch a Wave Seminar Series:

When: April 1, 2010 9:30 am – 2:00 pm

Where: PC Professional Headquarters, 1615 Webster Street, Oakland, CA

Need to still register for this event? Click here!

Microsoft is the Mother Ship of Collaboration

Microsoft, compared to its collaboration peers, Oracle, VMware, HP and Google, seems to move at a slow and steady pace. However, slow movement doesn’t always mean it is not without calculation. With a seven-year migration from desktop to web, Microsoft Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 business productivity tools will be offered on the cloud, which means complete and utter domination by the Mother Ship, a.k.a. Microsoft. Microsoft’s loyal customers will be able to access their work at work or on the web anywhere, anytime providing concurrent and seamless collaboration.

The key to their web dominance is Microsoft’s alignment of three of their proprietary code and document formatting technologies: Open XML as the document format, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) as the document model and Sliverlight as the runtime engine for the web. With these golden three, customers can easily move from desktop to the web to desktop again, moving and sharing documents, using SharePoint 2010 as their collaboration server.

What makes this such a smart move? Web collaboration tools from Google, Cisco and EMC cannot properly edit Open XML documents because they do not use Open XML. Open XML is an open document file format for saving and exchanging editable office documents, which mean Microsoft documents have invisible instructions embedded within their code that allows certain users access to data sets, run certain database queries and not others. For example, a chart being viewed by a team through an online wiki can be updated in real time even when the data in the corresponding spreadsheet is sitting somewhere on a desktop of the SharePoint server. Because most business documents have been created by a Microsoft program, a business would essentially have to reinvent the wheel in order to switch to a competing document editing product.

Of course, Google has not come without a fight. Using HTML5 as the backbone for their very own online collaboration tools is truly betting against the fact that businesses will continue to use legacy documents with Open XML coding. However, with billions of business documents that depend on Microsoft’s Open XML to render their business process, why would anyone switch? Google’s stance on the matter is you can convert anything. However, converting Open XML documents will break the code in the process, hence breaking your entire business process. According to many open source developers, Microsoft’s 7 years of migration from desktop to web, has paid off, with Microsoft being the only vendor right now to pull off this type of interoperability, seamlessly.

Whether Google fans would like to admit it or not, the world uses Microsoft and will continue to use Microsoft in their business processes. Ultimately, what Microsoft has succeeded in doing is taking in-office collaboration to the web and making it available anywhere without breaking those processes that make its applications so powerful to their end users.

To hear more about SharePoint 2010, attend PC Professional’s Catch a Wave Seminar Series:

When: April 1, 2010 9:30 am – 2:00 pm

Where: PC Professional Headquarters, 1615 Webster Street, Oakland, CA

Need to still register for this event? Click here!

Catch the Cut-Costs-and-Save-Energy Wave 2010

As you all may have noticed, I have not posted in, oh, about a month. Things have been hectic here at PC Professional, but most of the craziness has come from our big seminar, Catch a Wave of Collaboration, Communication & Green IT. One of our main goals when organizing a seminar is to make it interesting and applicable for most businesses. We definitely don’t want to 1.) bore you to tears or 2.) leave you thinking, “why did I just waste a couple hours of my life at that one IT seminar?!”

Hence, why I’ve been busy buzzing around researching what you all want to see and learn about. After careful consideration, my team and I decided on three important IT topics that we feel you should know, understand and apply.

1.) SharePoint 2010

2.) Virtualization- Microsoft Hyper-V

3.) Storage & Server Consolidation

And why are these topics important, you ask?

1.) You will cut IT expenses dramatically

2.) Energy usage will be at a minimum

3.) And with paperless collaboration, you will help save that thing we live on… wait… what is it called again? Oh yeah, the EARTH.

So if these points are not inticing enough, check out our agenda posted below:

What: Catch a Wave Seminar Series 2010

When: April 1, 2010 9:30am-2:00pm

Where: PC Professional headquarters, 1615 Webster Street, Oakland, CA

Why: To help your IT staff save money, time and energy

Registration (9:30am-10:00am)

TRACK 1: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (10:00am-11:00am)

In our first morning track, Microsoft experts will present a live demo of how their paperless solution for office collaboration can make your team more productive and make your office more environmentally-friendly. Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 brings users together to share information, documents, create intelligent workflows to manage your increasing customer base and just about everything in between to keep your business process up-to-date.

TRACK 2: Microsoft Hyper-V (11:00am-12:00pm)

In our second morning track, Microsoft virtualization experts will dive straight into why virtualization can cut costs, save energy and ultimately pay for itself. A recent study conducted by InformationWeek revealed that by 2011, more than half of business technology professionals will have their servers virtualized. Our Microsoft virtualization experts will present what the key benefits are to going virtual and what you can do now to start the process. Our experts will also be examining key virtualization solutions such as Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V Server 2008 and other top Microsoft solutions and explain the benefits of each.

Lunch & Chat (12:00pm-12:30pm)

Our Lunch & Chat session offers a networking opportunity for IT professionals like, yourself, to discuss emerging trends in the field. Grab a plate, sit next to a stranger & network.

TRACK 3:  HP Storage & Server Consolidation (12:30pm-1:30pm)

As technology becomes greener, so do companies and by consolidating your IT environment, you can reduce your carbon footprint and help save the environment. Often times, small businesses stray away from server consolidation because, to be honest, it sounds intimidating. However, what a lot of companies do not know is that server consolidation is not only an important green initiative, but also a huge money saver. Energy and cooling costs add up in a multi-server environment, but by consolidating servers, costs decrease dramatically. In our final track of the day, our HP server expert will explain the benefits of server consolidation and why so many companies, big and small alike, are consolidating.

Wrap-up: Giveaways Raffle, Questions & Comments (1:30-2:00pm)

We will be wrapping up our seminar with a giveaways raffle, which will include prizes from Microsoft and HP as well as have our experts answer any other additional questions you may have or comments on how you think we can improve our future seminars.

Need to still register for this event? Click here!

-OR-  do you need help convincing your boss? Download our invite & attach it in your persuasive email.

It’s All About the Margins, Dell

Oh Dell, we love your cheap prices, but are they worth struggling for? Yesterday, the Nasdaq market closed with Dell shares dropping a whopping 5.4% after closing at $14.43. Dell continues to struggle with balancing growth and profitability.

Brian Gladden Dell’s Chief Financial Officer, said the quarter was positive because Dell “saw solid growth return”. However, the company was also “disappointed” by its profit margins. Profit margins, meaning they are pricing their pcs at an extremely low price. Currently, the Optiplex 760 desktop has a list price of $966, but is on sale for $699. Even servers are being discounted. Many companies that used to use no-name servers are now switching to Dell servers because they are a name brand and have comparable prices. Dell, I think you need to re-assess your pricing structure here.

Since Michael Dell has returned back in 2007, Dell still has not made much of a comeback. Dell tried entering retail sales, expanding its business services and improving their PC appeal to consumer. Unfortunately, Dell hasn’t been able to boost its profit to HP’s level.

Dell is #3 now in the market, no longer providing the best customer service or producing the most reliable computers. Apparently, analysts believe Dell is lost. Their business model is not working well in 2010 and needs to be changed. See Bloomberg News Clip Below: