Most of you tech savvy business people out there have had a LinkedIn account for years, but have you been truly using it to increase your business opportunities?

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional online network with more than 45 million users representing 150 industries, and in case you’re wondering, the company itself is valued around $1 billion. Since September 2008, when the economic crisis hit, it has seen a 25% increase in the rate of sign-ups as concerned professionals look to keep their contacts up to date. That equates to approximately 1 million new users every two weeks. In terms of activity by those users, in the last two months there has been a 15% increase in the issuing of invitations to get people to join business networking circles and there has also been a 14% increase in the amount of recommendations made by users endorsing another member of LinkedIn.

The explosion of LinkedIn usage brings to mind the age old question of Quantity versus Quality.   Would you prefer to have 500 good contacts, or would you rather have 50 great contacts? The former may inflate your network statistics, but the latter may inflate your sales statistics. We can’t all be like Ron Bates, but do we want to be?

Who is Ron Bates you ask? With 44,000 direct contacts on LinkedIn, Ron has been referred to as “the most connected man on Earth.” In fact, I just tried to connect with Ron last night. I haven’t been accepted yet, but I did it for fun and I don’t expect any business to come from it. To effectively use LinkedIn to promote and grow your business you don’t need a ton of contacts, you just need a handful of great contacts that are in need of the services that your company offers and are interested in working with you or know others who would be.

If you’re hoping to reap the benefits of a LinkedIn account, you need to commit to actively using it on a consistent basis. At the very least you should look at your profile every day to see to see who your contacts are networking with, and if there are more “People You May Know” listed in your profile. Remember, your contacts’ new contacts are now in your network, and the groups they have joined may be of interest to you.

The bottom-line with LinkedIn is that people would much rather work with people who their friends and colleagues know and trust. To truly realize a return on the investment of time required by LinkedIn you need to increase your number of viable connections and thus increase your chances of getting more business. In order to make your profile more appealing you need to nurture it by being committed to completing at least one or two LinkedIn tasks every single day. Make a connection, join a group, or just enhance your profile. Be sure to track the traffic to your website and what percentage of it comes from LinkedIn.

There are many ways to establish sustainable relationships through LinkedIn.  Find out how to put the power of LinkedIn to work for your business by downloading part one and two of our three part series.

A quick reminder for business owners that we’re nearing the deadline to purchase and install new hardware and software and qualify for the Section 179 deduction.

Please contact us ASAP at 1-866-GO-SITE if you need assistance with a quote for replacement equipment or assistance with installation.

When I was working from home the other day, I started to feel a sharp pain in my side.  At first, it was just annoying but it really started slowing me down.  I was working on filing the forms for my defense in the murder charges that had recently been brought against me which really isn’t that fun so I decided that instead of continuing, I would give myself surgery to see if I could find the cause of my pain and resolve it.  I figured hey, I’ve been living with this body for 38 years, who knows it better than me?

So I got out my trusty pocket knife and jammed it into my side just above the area where the pain was so I could look around.  I took out a few organs and made quite a mess before I realized that I was probably in over my head, so I jammed everything back in and used my trusty Swingline stapler to close my side up.  Then I went back to the murder defense because I was there, who could defend me better than me?

Sound ridiculous?  Of course!!  But for some reason, we step into situations every day where non-technology folks decide that they can setup a new server or firewall themselves because they figure “how hard could it be?” only to find out that their “work” has not not only delayed the project, but for us to undo what they did will take twice as long as if they had simply let us take care of it.

We have created a checklist of questions to ask yourself before embarking on an IT project on your own.  By answering these questions honestly, it will help you decide if you should call a professional.  You can probably come up with a similar checklist for when to call a doctor or lawyer as well.

Download 5 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Starting an IT Project on Your Own

Over the years, I’ve worked with businesses, schools and nonprofits to help them find the right technology resources to meet their particular needs and goals.  In many cases, the “devil they know” is the resource that they continued to use year after year -  either because they were concerned that change might not bring something better, or because they weren’t sure if their expectations of a better partnership were realistic.

Let’s start by considering when you might look for a technology partner.  The obvious answer is when you don’t have a full-time IT person, web site designer or developer on staff.  But even if you do have someone handling the day-to-day needs internally, planning for a project that they haven’t done before or discussing possibilities of how technology can help you reach your goals may be areas where you can have the best of both worlds - someone who knows your environment and your culture and someone who can bring an outside viewpoint and a wide-range of experience and training.

No matter what your specific network includes or what your challenges are, there are 5 critical factors that you can use to evaluate your technology resource - whether you rely on internal staff, outside consulting or a combination of the two.  Download the list of 5 critical factors to keep in mind as you plan for 2010.

The commercials are out, the advertising machine is hard at work and now that October 22nd has passed, Windows 7 is at our doorstep.

Having been a tinkerer of computers since modifying the config.sys file on my father’s 386 to play games, the new offering from Microsoft immediately intrigued me.  I decided to be an early adopter on my home machine, dutifully using the Windows 7 Beta and Release Candidate for roughly the past 6 months despite my general distaste for the Vista offering.

Windows 7 is the smoothest and most stable Windows OS I have encountered.  Yes, this includes my time using the Beta build.  My machine crashed exactly zero times in the past half year running it.  This honestly surprised me.  For those wondering, I have not been one to back Microsoft products without question.  In fact, my first machine ran IBM’s OS/2.  This should help form the basis that I have put Windows 7 through a certain range of paces that match my normal home usage.

While this is not a scientific top to bottom view of the OS, it will help to highlight some of the main points that one may encounter when using the software.

Part 1:  Installation.

The installation experience has been improved with Windows 7.  The wizards are less clunky and the screens more informative than in previous iterations of Microsoft OS’s.  Even better, the entire process always had a feel of continued progress.  This is in stark contrast to some previous offerings, such as XP or even Server 2003 in which you may be staring at a “Loading Devices” screen for the better part of 30 minutes.

I intentionally decided to not scrub my machine’s OS partition prior to installation to see what my options would be.  I was happily surprised to see that Windows 7 recognized my previous installation and essentially quarantined it.  This previous installation could later be accessed easily through Windows Explorer by going to the Windows.old directory.  Given that my normal operating procedure in any OS load would be to move all of my important files, configs etc to a different drive before formatting the partition and starting from scratch, this feature is a great benefit.  How many people forget something when moving files around?  Now those files can be easily searched and any missing pieces found.  Further, if you have decided you don’t need the old files at all, simply delete them.

The overall slick feel of the installation instilled confidence that what I had been hearing about Windows 7:  “It is everything Vista should have been” may in fact be true.

Part 2:  Your new desktop

Admittedly, I never fully adopted Vista.  As such, some of the UI features that came from Vista into Windows 7 are essentially new to me.  Logging in for the first time, I was stunned at the desktop.  My graphics card had not changed, I had no more RAM and indeed these were my same monitors, yet wow!  The difference in the UI, especially for those moving from XP such as myself, is stunning.  Again, same exact hardware but I felt like I just traded in a jalopy for a Jaguar.  The visual treatments of the start bar, the icons, etc really work.  They are not over the top, but rather understated.  The result is a tremendously clean feel.

The start menu, now a larger round button, contains all the items you would expect.  In addition, the search feature right in line with the menu allows for quick access to programs for which you do not want to hunt.  For someone who grew up professionally using net commands, this ability to type is a benefit.  For those programs you use most often, you can choose to “pin” them to the start menu or to your taskbar.

Moving a bit more through the desktop, I found the greatest use out of the Library system.  Essentially one has sections within Windows Explorers called Libraries that are linked to such things as Documents, Pictures, Downloads, etc.  You are free to edit the existing ones or create your own.  These provide an easy mechanism for organization.  They are essentially a collection of folders that are contained under a single item.  They default to locations created by the OS, usually C:\Users\…  I tend to have my information on other drives, so historically I would eschew the use or move such items as “My Documents” to point to my preferred location.  Now, I can not only do that, but I can add in folders to include into the library.  If you wish to segregate items for a home machine, you could create folders within your documents library for all the users within the household.  Or for pictures, perhaps you have an area that you want to use as a scratch directory for edits and another that you want to make sure gets backed up.  With this facility, you can access all the pictures as necessary through the library while under the hood, you can have the different folders line up with whatever backup or security regime you desire.  This single point of entry for the most used items has been enjoyable and easy to use.

Part 3:  Performace, i.e. the “paces”

My home computer serves a myriad of purposes.  From planning out home improvements, to running CAD programs, playing video games to listening to music, it is a hub of both production and entertainment.  I find I usually need to be doing two things at once and as a computer nut I find I usually try to break things.  Now that I was suitably impressed by the look and feel of Windows 7, it  was time to try and break it.

Some machines, CPUs, and Operating Systems multi task better than others.  Years ago I was able to run X-wing in a window while listening to MP3s on my OS/2 machine while people around me couldn’t run two contiguous directory commands in Windows 95 without delays between the two windows.  I essentially recreated this test, just updated by 12 or so years.  The machine in question is powered  by a 3 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, a 512 MB ATi video card and a 500GB 7200RPM SATA Drive.

I began by bringing up 3 different browsers:  Safari, IE and Chrome.  In Chrome I started pandora to stream music.  In IE I had the machine look for updates, and Safari I directed to Youtube, muting a longer video but letting it play.  I then opened up 2 instances of World of Warcraft, logging in two different characters.   To further tax the machine, I then decided to burn a Blu-ray.  With this happening, the music only skipped when I initially loaded up a new program, the Youtube ran cleanly and I was able to alt-tab between both instances of Wow and play without any framerate issues.  Looking through task manager I could see that none of the Cores on the CPU were spiked and there while there was  heavy RAM usage, it was not detrimental to any of the individual program.

I did this until the Blu-ray finished burning, at which point I ended the very unscientific test and checked to see if the data on the disc was good.  As it turns out, there were no errors.  Also, there were no errors in any Windows logs.  This same test, performed with the identical hardware on XP SP2 suffered from skips in both the video and audio playback.  The CPU usage ramped up much higher as well, peaking at 100% in some cases.  To its credit, the XP machine also did not have much issue with the instances of Wow.  As I mentioned however, these tests were not performed on the same build of hardware or similar machines, but actually on the same exact hardware.

While this is not a conclusive test of the sturdiness of the OS, it is a more practical application of the types of things that it can handle as part of normal usage.

Part 4:  Wait and see?

I looked at the opportunity to use Windows 7 as a way to ease concerns.  Machines will now be shipping with Windows 7 loaded, and for many, there is no comfort level with the new offering.  More than anything else, the experience of the last 6 months has shown that there is a lot less to fear than in the past.

Is there a learning curve?  Certainly.  However, and this is vitally important, the system is stable.  No lost files, no random crashes.  While everyone’s mileage may vary and no one can say that it is bug free and will never fail, the humble opinion of this blogger is that the benefits outweigh the risks.  For older machines that may not see the benefit of its resource handling, etc, then XP is probably still fine.
If you are in the market for a new machine, though, I would not turn away because of Windows 7.  So far I have no personal indication that there is a need to “wait for service pack 1″ before buying.  In fact, as I start shopping for my next laptop, you can bet that Windows 7 Ultimate will be one of the first choices I check off.

Have you ever Googled yourself or the company you work for?  Come on, you know you have!  It’s human nature to wonder what others are writing about you and the company you work for.  Before accepting your new position, didn’t you Google your new company to see if you could find any negative information?  Googling is an easy way to lose hours sorting through irrelevant web entries hoping to find the information you’re repeatedly looking for.  Valuable time and energy can be saved by using one of Google’s many convenient and useful tools, in this case, Google Alerts.

Google Alerts are emails or RSS feeds automatically sent to you when there are new Google search results for your specified terms.  After signing up using your GMail account on the Google Alerts homepage, you enter the search term, type of alert (search Google News, Google Groups, or the web), frequency of emails (daily, as it happens, or weekly), and your email address. Google Alerts sends you an email each time a new page for your chosen term makes it in the top twenty results on Google’s web search. You can set up alerts for as many as 1,000 search terms.  Google Alerts currently offers 6 variations of alerts - News, Web, Blogs, Comprehensive, Video and Groups.

• A News alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.

• A Web alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.

• A Blogs alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.

• A Comprehensive alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.

• A Video alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search.

• A Groups alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.

Google Alerts’ many uses make them convenient and helpful in our daily personal lives including monitoring a developing news story, tracking medical advances, being aware of what is being written about family members, and even getting the latest on a celebrity or sports team.  But there are many professional reasons to harness the power of Google Alerts, find out how to put the power of Google Alerts to work for your business by downloading Ten Important Business Uses of Google Alert.

I’m about halfway through the book Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne.   The gist of the book is that if you can find a new way to provide goods or services or a whole new market, then you can make the competition irrelevant and be a unique provider in a calm blue ocean of marketplace.  No longer will you be stuck in the churning bloodbath or “red ocean” of competition with others who all provide the same products or services and are forced to compete by price-cutting or other sales tactics with no hope of taking over meaningful market share.

To make your competition irrelevant, you have to take an in-depth look at what you and your competitors all do:

• Determine what truly has value to the customer (to do more of this)
• Uncover what the customer doesn’t care about (to reduce or eliminate)
• Look outside of your existing marketplace to see if there is untapped potential for creating a new service or product to address needs of people who do not do business with you today (untapped potential customers)

The hardest part is to put aside your preconceived ideas of your industry and open your mind to think of new ways to solve your customer’s needs.  I’ve been in the technology field for over 20 years, so this has been easier said than done, but it’s a great mental exercise.

Think about your own business.  Do you do things because “that’s the way it’s done”?  What could you eliminate or reduce without hurting the customer experience?  What could you increase or create to enhance the customer experience and set yourself apart from the competition - possibly even creating something never offered before?  What if you could recapture past clients that you had lost, new clients who chose a competitor, and potential clients with demands that are not being met in your marketplace?

If you have ideas for us to consider for what you’d like to see if anything was possible for technology support or web sites, or if you would like to brainstorm about your business to get an outside perspective, I’d love to hear from you.  Please leave a comment on the blog or email me at tlf@foresitetech.com.

With all of the buzz about Microsoft’s latest plight in the search game, Bing, I decided I should do a little research.  Naturally where did I start?  Google.  As Google has become virtually synonymous with web search, Microsoft is fighting an uphill battle even with the troops that they have, but hopefully this will help those who are trying to make a decision a little bit.

To begin, Microsoft is claiming that Bing is supposed to help users make intelligent decisions, not simply push back results so that seemed like a good starting point for comparison.  I decided to do some parallel searches with Google and Bing to see where it got me.  My first search was “Where should I eat dinner tonight?”.  For both search engines, this was just too vague.  As a seasoned searcher, I added “in Hartford” to the search to see if that helped.  While a few restaurant guides came back in each, none were very relevant or targeted for my purpose.  For example, there were ones for “restaurants close to the Hartford Court House”.  As helpful as that may be for your repeat offenders, I try to stay in the more mainstream areas in Hartford and out of trouble.

Then genius hit me.  As someone in the network support business, I searched for “Network Support Hartford CT” to see some relevant results in today’s business world.  The results in Bing were mixed.  While 3 of the top 4 results were network support companies (including ForeSite in position #2), only 5 of the 10 results on the first page were relevant.  In Google, 8 of the 10 were related to network support though 2 were for jobs in the network support field.  While I personally believe that we should be the first result in all engines we were #3 in Google.  When you remove duplicate sites in both search engines, and the paid results in Google, the results were very similar though and it would be tough to make a decision on this alone.

Bing did have one feature that I thought was helpful which was the Document Preview feature.  When hovering a result, it tries to grab relevant text from the site and display it in a pop-up window without having to go to the site.  This was helpful to see if the displayed result was relevant without having to go to all of the different web sites listed.  This is not ground breaking, but was helpful.  Bing’s last feature that was obvious was the recent search results on the left hand side of the search page.  I’m not sure how helpful this will be over time, but I could see a few applications for it if you are looking for something you found in the recent past but can’t remember what you searched for.

So, I think this is a “no decision” unfortunately for Microsoft as they will have to come out with some real bells and whistles to de-thrown Google in the search business.

Social media - everybody’s talking about it and trying to figure out how to use it for their business.  There was a great panel discussion on Friday at the Hartford Business Journal’s eTechnology Summit which confirmed that it’s all so new that no one can really claim to be an “expert” yet, but there is so much opportunity.  I’ll talk about my own experience and hopefully that will give you some ideas of how you might be able to leverage social media.

I started using Twitter and set up a FaceBook page for my “business self” several months ago.  I had several goals in mind:

1. Although I have 20+ years in the technology business, I changed firms and came to ForeSite Technologies about 6 months ago.  I am always looking for ways to get the word out so that folks I have met in my previous life can easily find me.
2. Former coworkers who know and trust my work are a wonderful source of referrals, and I love to be able keep in touch and help them too.  But the more time goes by, the less you find yourself sending an email or picking up the phone just to check in.
3. Through face-to-face networking, I meet a lot of great people who work with the same types of clients as I do - small businesses, nonprofits, and schools.  Twitter gives me a way to send out short bits of information on my projects, events I am attending, and little tidbits about my day to help them get to know me better without a big time commitment.

The benefits so far:

• People reading my tweets on Twitter are linking back to the ForeSite web site.  This is enabling me to share information about ForeSite with people I have never met and increasing awareness of our network and web site solutions.
• A former coworker that I hadn’t been in touch with in years reached out after a layoff.  ForeSite was considering adding a new role, and now we’re working together again.
• Clients and folks I see at networking events know me as a suit-wearing professional.  I find they bond with me more when they learn that I eat Skittles by the handful and can wield a Nerf gun with the best of them.  People do business with and recommend people that they trust, and they more they get to know me, the greater confidence they have in sharing problems that they or their clients have to see if I can help.

Things to consider:

• It’s great to show your human side, but don’t forget that you are addressing clients, coworkers and others that you hope to do business with.  If you wouldn’t say it face to face, don’t say it.
• I recommend maintaining a separate FaceBook account for family and close friends for posting funny anecdotes and sharing of family photos.
• Don’t start and stop!  You can’t build a following if you tweet once and go dark for months.  Make updating your social media sites part of your daily work routine.

It will be interesting to see how my experience changes as social media continues to evolve.  Stay tuned!

One of the most common things I hear when I meet with small business owner to talk about technology is “I just want it to work”. You didn’t start your business because you wanted to design and maintain a computer network or a web site, but you have come to the realization that you can’t do business without them.

According to this article in Technology, Inc magazine the top ranked concerns for small business are:

• Using technology to reduce costs in other areas
• Stretching the lifespan of your hardware
• Finding vendors that can understand their company and tailor solutions to fit their needs

My Dad owned a small business, and I saw him struggle with the same issues. That makes it very personal for me to provide resources for my clients that my Dad didn’t always have, and to be able to save them from making some of the mistakes he experienced.

Not every technology investment is a good one, but the ones that make sense can really pay off. For example, when personal computers were just making their way into the business world, Dad saw a demonstration of the “paperless office” concept and immediately saw where using computers to gather information once, store it electronically, and move it from order taking to production to delivery could save time and prevent orders being lost along the way. His return on investment came quickly as less people handled an order, mistakes were reduced saving material and labor to redo orders, and the gap between taking an order and receiving payment was greatly reduced.

This positive experience led to a misconception that all technology investments would be great for business. I’ll talk about examples of failures in future blog posts.

What can you do when facing these concerns?

• Take a close look at your business. Ask employees how they spend their time and where they see bottlenecks. Is there a way to automate process?
• Weigh cost and risk. If the hardware and software can handle your needs for another year, then hold off on the replacement, but don’t skimp on maintenance and keep the hardware under warranty. These two steps can prevent unexpected and costly downtime.
• Find a technology resource that you trust and talk to them about your whole business, not just your computers. The more they understand what you do, how you do it now, and why you do it, the better their recommendations can be.