LANcom Technology Blog

From time to time we get new customers with existing wireless connections – Woosh a good example.

Most times we get them off wireless as early as the contract permits.

In 2007 if you are in a city area you will have access to DSL which is much more reliable and now much faster.

A Woosh 20 GByte plan with a meagre targeted speed of 1.6Mbyte/s download and 120kbyte/s upload is $59.95 per month.

Orcon’s 30 GByte plan , for the same amount, has targeted speeds of 8Mb/s download and 3Mb/s upload

As anyone with a sky decoder knows, sending digital signals over wireless connections is very susceptible to atmospheric conditions.

From a technology perspective the only reason you would have wireless is if DSL or some other cable based solution was not available (e.g. in rural areas) or if you needed portable access (e.g. 3G access cards for notebooks).

The rules may change in a couple of years when the new WiMax wireless protocols start getting used but I suspect all they will do is push DSL to the faster speeds and cheaper plans that are eminently feasible today

The benefits of being able to have a meeting without having to get everyone together in the same place at the same time are obvious. It basically comes down to time, money, and convenience. Time is saved in trying to find a time when all attendees can be in the same place and then travelling to that place, money is saved in travel costs, and it is more convenient as attendees have all the resources available to them that they would normally have without having to transport them anywhere.

Wondering how to get started? Here are a couple of ways to do it.

Microsoft Live meeting

Microsoft Live meeting allows you to have a fully interactive collaboration with people anywhere in the world. All participants need is a net connected P.C. Here are its key features.

• It allows you to have meetings with small or large groups of people.
• It can display files from Word, Visio, Excel, PowerPoint, and many others. If you can see it on your screen to can show it in a live meeting. You can even show websites.
• It allows you to make notes on the screen to help convey ideas better. Want to emphasize a certain figure? Why not draw a big red circle around it while you are talking about it.
• It allows participants to print out the presentation as a handout.
• It can give other users remote control of your machine so that they can making adjustments to things e.g fixing a wrong figure.
• It can record the whole meeting as a Windows Media file so that you can send it to anyone that could not attend or anyone you think might find it useful.
• It enables you to meet with people inside or outsider your organisation and participants pay nothing to connect.

Microsoft Live Meeting’s uses just to name a few are: Sales calls, training sessions, customer demonstrations, new product introductions and team meetings.

There are two versions of Microsoft live meeting the Standard edition and the Professional edition and you can chose from either a subscription or a per-minute pricing depending on how much you intend on using it. I will hopefully be trying out the free trial version of this in the next few weeks so stay tuned for a novices opinion on what its like to work with.

Instant messaging

With Windows Messenger, the free instant messaging program that comes with Windows XP Professional, you have a number of options for holding web conferences. You can:

• Share applications - for example allowing someone to make changes to a PowerPoint presentation.
• Open a white board and share information as if you were sharing a piece of paper.
• Send and receive files and photos
• Hold a video conference for you and another contact
• Have voice communication.
• Have a text communication.

More information on instant messaging features is available here.

How do I quickly get the copyright symbol in Word?

Alt+Ctrl+C returns ©

Here is some shortcut keystrokes that once learnt could save you from having to look for certain actions in various menus.

(the Alt keys are on either side of the spacebar, the CTRL keys are the left and right corner of the bottom row of keys)

Why should you consider flat-panel monitors for your business? I found an article on hp’s website that explains the benefits. Here is a quick summery.

Power consumption - LCD (Liquid crystal display) monitors are more energy efficient. Their power consumption is around one-fifth of an equivalent-sized CRT (cathode-ray tube) monitor.

Space - A typical 15-inch flat-panel monitor requires one-fifth the space needed for a 17-inch CRT.

Increased comfort and efficiency – Flat-panel monitors: minimise glare (greatly improving legibility under any kind of light), offer minimal distortion, minimise screen flicker, compared to CRTs emit very little electromagnetic radiation, and are considerably easier on the eyes. All these factors together mean less eyestrain and greater work efficiency for anyone using them.

Environmental responsibility – Hp’s LCD monitors: are designed for minimal energy consumption, can be returned for recycling at the end of their life cycles, and are made with ODC (ozone- depleting chemical)-free manufacturing process.

Professional image – The slim line design looks great anywhere.

The full version of the article is available here. Or if you would like to talk to us about flat screens in your business you can contact as at info@lancom.co.nz

Can often come down to how you view your IT – expense or Investment.

Do you see the $70000 per annum spend or the $2000000 per annum income of which IT is an essential, irreplaceable part?

In their IT planning the former always start by minimising and restricting the 70k while the latter start by protecting and growing the $2M.

The former are always pained over how over priced IT doesn’t deliver. The latter smile all way to the bank.

Why your small business needs an intranet

I found this great Microsoft article on how small business can benefit from having an intranet which I will summarise for you now. An Intranet is similar to a Website but it’s an internal network. Only people within the company have access to it. Most large companies have intranets but there are three ways that intranets can assist small businesses as well. First of all communication suffers when dealing with more than one person. As anyone on the receiving end of an inaccurate rumour will tell you, stories change as they spread. An intranet can solve this problem. It’s the perfect place to post weekly reports, memos, and goals so that everyone is on the same page.

Secondly time is money. An intranet can save you time as critical information can be posted there for all employees to see. That way they don’t have to go looking for it. Finally it’s better than email. Emailing multiple versions of the same document or presentation can lead to confusion and information overload. By using an intranet, people can work on a shared file and have a central location for the most recent file, this will also safe space on your server.

The full version of this article is available here. Or if you’re interested in setting up your own intranet contact us at info@lancom.co.nz

What is CRM?

CRM is about creating a single view of the customer, deepening your knowledge of them so that you can better meet their needs, and increase value for them.

Creating a single view means all interactions with a customer must be recorded and stored in the same place. Customers should be viewed not as a set of independent transactions but as a lifetime income stream.

Why should you think about CRM?

The main economic benefits include:

• Retention – Acquisition is almost always more expensive than retention. By capturing and analysing as much information as possible on your customers you are able to better meet their needs increasing satisfaction and retention. Additionally by storing all interactions with a customer in one place you may be able to identify indicators that a customer is likely to churn, for example complaining in conjunction with a decrease in purchasing, and act to prevent this from happening.
• Identification of your most valuable customers – By keeping tract of the recency, frequency, and monetary value of each customer you are easily able to identify those that are worth the most to you or will be worth the most to you in their lifetime and work to retain them. You could do this in a number of ways but for example you could ensure that they always get a fast response to complaints or enquires by having their emails/ phone calls jump to the front of the queue.
• Increased opportunities to cross–sell and up-sell. The increase in stored information and single view of the customer you can gain when you implement CRM allows you to easily and quickly identify those customers that may be interested in complementary products or that are ready to move up to a premium version of the product. One way you could do this would be to look at customers that have already been cross-sold and up-sold and compare their characteristic with others in your database to predict those that are likely to be willing to cross-sell and up-sell.

  CRM software

Once you know what it is you want to achieve with CRM you can begin to look at the software that will help you to do it.

LANcom uses StayinFront CRM software to integrate all points of customer interaction (Sales, marketing, customer support). This software can be easily customised to fit an organisation’s information requirements. This software is business class. We have been able to build our entire business around it and we couldn’t run without it. Stayinfront CRM is designed from ground up to be customised so that although we have spent many tens of thousands of dollars to get it to fit the LANcom way like a glove it is easy to support and can be changed daily with virtually no downtime.

For more Economy class solutions to get you started you can try Microsoft’s CRM software Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0

If you are interest in setting up CRM software in your business contact us at info@lancom.co.nz

This blog is in-progress. We are continually reviewing what’s on it and what responses we get. Tthat is the nature of blogging I guess.

On the blog I hope to cover issues and developments in Information Technology that will help our customers to get better returns on their technology investment.

There’s many technologies and quite a bit of editorial and comment possible. But I also want this site to be an aggregator of information. One site where Kiwi business can go to see what’s new and with a click can get there. We haven’t had as much as this kind of content as there should be. To this end I have invited LANcom’s Mysti Griffin to start posting here. Part of Mysti’s task is to find the new technology releases from our principal suppliers, write an executive summary about that and then give you plenty of links to find out more about (or contact us if you like).

Please feel free to feedback, by comment or email, anything else you would like to appear here.

From the moment that we got broadband we started thinking about backing up over the Internet. All this bandwidth could be used to copy our files over the Internet to a remote location. It would make backing up automatic and painless and it would get rid of the high maintenance tape systems we have all suffered with for 20 years.

And so it has been for notebook users and home users backing up individual files – Office documents and photos etc

It has not been so good for business systems and, in particular, servers that businesses own.

There are a couple of key reasons today why we cannot use over-the-Internet backup for servers.

The first is that broadband in NZ is not so fast. At 1Mbit/s you can transfer approximately 400Mbytes an hour. Until recently all DSL broadband plans like Jetstream, Bitstream etc (that were the only broadband option for most NZ companies) were restricted to 128Kbit/s (an arbitrary limit invented by Telecom’s marketing department). That meant you could only backup 50Mbyte an hour at best. Most of our customers are backing up tens of gigabytes (1 Gbyte = 1000 Mbyte) a night so a full backup was not possible. DSL Broadband got better in the last few months (up to 700KBit/s) but this was still nowhere fast enough to replicate the full backups we do to tape every night. You could get clever and do partial and staged backups but this still was inadequate for volatile database files like Exchange databases.

The second issue is restoration. There are many Internet backup systems that are brilliant at backing up and restoring individual user files. These are the services that notebook and home users use. The problem is that Windows 2003 is brilliant at restoring individual user files and Exchange 2003 is better than most of these services at restoring individual emails. In 2007 you only need to go to your tape backup for the large restores like losing your Exchange database or your entire drive. In these cases no matter how cleverly you broke up the backup to accommodate insufficient bandwidth you will need to do a full restore and quickly. In NZ it is just not feasible to bring 30 GBytes back over the Internet using DSL. So the restoration will involve some kind of physical swapping of tape drive or hard disk. Most restorations will have to be custom solutions.

There is hope. Where a Line-of-business application is less that 100Mb it is very feasible to backup overnight (particularly now that Telecom’s onerous data charging has been paired back) and restore effectively. Exchange 2007 has built in features to trickle every small change over an Ethernet connection in real time. This resolves the backup half of the equation.

In the interim the only way to get effective over-the-Internet backup is to have a replication server. With products like double take you can have every tiny block write on your live server’s disk copied over the Internet to a replication server that is an exact replica. The software is not cheap ($5000 USD license for each of the two servers) and you need two physical servers. But if you have to have over the Internet backup today this is the way.

I have been using the new version of MS Office, Office 2007, for the last couple of weeks.

There’s some new things you can do (I blogged about blog posting from Word earlier)

Microsoft has a lot of information about the new version here

My first impression is that there are not many huge innovations and that most of the work has been done making the existing functionality easier and more intuitive to use.

In Word 2003, whenever I changed a style sheet there was always some tidy up of tables or headings that didn’t come through the process looking so good. 95% of it was right, but the 5% wrong looked awful and needed the attention.

Microsoft has given this attention in their update.

When I was a kid cars had no air-conditioning and vinyl seats. Air-conditioning and Velour didn’t get you there any faster but once you had these features you would never go back. The new features in Office are the same.