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If you’re interested go to: http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/ and give it a try.

What if your machine breaks, the O/S is reinstalled? or you get a new machine. Login to the appstore and browse your library and install.

Get an offline backup and your done. Your recovery plan is ready to go. Wouldn’t that be nice.

Taking this one step further and have a bootable image on your Hard drive or some type of media, and have your O/S available on the app store as well. Instant desaster recovery plan, and perhaps a yearly rebuild with statistics of what apps you actually use to know if you should install it again.

Lets hope this is the evolution.

Email can be a blessing and nightmare. You may have many addresses, check the mail on multiple locations and left with a sync problem, contacts all over the place, and not being able to get your email when you really need it. There is an answer to all of this, and it can actually save you money, increase your productivity, add more functionality and features then you ever thought of trying. This is Google for Apps for your domain. This is not Gmail branded email, but your own domain. Check it out here. First, what is the cost. $50 per year per user. or less then $5 a month.

All email is saved forever, each email accounts gets 25GB of storage. There is IMAP integration, so when you read your mail in one place, every other location you read it from will show it has been read, replied, archived etc. All your contacts are in one location. Plus you get additional Anti-Spam features, email archiving, site and individual email spam control, etc. How much again? $50 per user per year.

Think about how you may use your existing email provider. Either you use the system your web host provides, and deal with email limits, and stuck with syncing between machines with some series of manual or semi-automated steps that often fail. I’ve been there, it’s not worth it. What if you want to use your smart phone to read, reply, search for email, or find contact? Let Google and other 3rd party developers make use of the strong API to build this interface for you. There is a large community, where your web host probably doesn’t have others extending it.

If you use SalesForce for your CRM, Google Apps has an integration. Every day it seems more apps are added.

If you have multiple emails, how to handle that? Well Google has this great feature in the email client that checks your other email accounts and archives it or deletes it on the originating system and brings it into their system. When you reply to that email from another domain, it replies as you where sending it from that other email system. No one will ever know it was from your other email system. So all your emails are funneled into one system. I have only reached 10% of my storage usage after years of use, and collecting multiple emails from other systems.

Store documents, collaborate real time using Google Apps.

Give it a shot. If you are not interested in learning how to do the transition and migrating all your email from your old system into Google Apps solution, send me a message and I’ll be happy to assist you or do the entire migration. The cost varies depending on users, application usage, and migration situation. Contact me here.

When you go to a site, from a link in your email, often times that link is masking you of the real destination. How do you know? Well there has to be some tool our service that can verify for you that the site your going to is legitimate.

There is a product called eSoft Web Filter. Which goal is to do a lot of this for you. This is a Add-In to a network security device that we provide. Put the two together and you will be protected with less interference to your users and maintaining each machine as well as the additional cost.

I am suggesting a solution that we provide. That is the sole reason why we provide this solution, is because it works and we use it. We never suggest anything we do not use our selves or trust. We are the filter, there are tons of choices, all with good and bad characteristics, and we present the shining stars and bring it to you.

Contact Us today

The Web site needs to have the following minimum characteristics.  Analytics to track the number of visitors, where they are located at, their browsers, capabilities, and where they go on the site. How do you plan on getting your visitors to contact you? Put your physical address, phone number, contact-us area. I’m concerned about privacy just like everyone else, so the physical address is a PO box, and the phone number is masked by using Google’s Grand Central option, and the contact-us is a form which is stored into a Google Docs spreadsheet for tracking of your To-Do List. More on that in a moment.

The website also needs to be compatable as much as possible to other browsers. As more and more mobile devices come around this will be of particular concern. It’s a constant battle. Supporting IE only is never acceptable. There are solutions to make this easier, one is using a CSS framework such as blueprintcss, but you need to test. At the very least, test Firefox, IE, Safari. I’m guilty of not having an iPhone compatible site, and some older IE browsers doesn’t look good, but it’s a work in progress.

E-Mail, Use a company that has active development on it, constantly improving it, adding more extensions, and has an active extensions, has an interest in continually supporting this. I use Google for my back end with my own domain. Why? I now have my email available using IMAP on all my machines, on my blackberry, iPhone, and active community making better integrations.

Calendar again I choose Google, why? It’s available virtually everywhere, is hosted, I can create multiple calendars. One for my things to do, subscribe to other events, and a public calendar to share to others. It has an API to support 3rd party integrations, supports iCal so all my devices can see the same information. Always sync’d and accessible.

To-Do-List is important to move your business in a direction, or you’ll get stuck in rut of re-active. I’m on the fence here. Google recently added this to their Mail services, so thats another reason why Google to host your domain email. But currently I’m using 37Signals Backpack which has a strong API, active 3rd party tools. The reason why I haven’t moved off of this is due to their other products, and potential integrations with Highrise for example which is there CRM tool.

Contact Management tool, to keep track of contacts, what correspondence you’ve had, email, phone numbers, websites. I really like Highrise for this since you can setup a BCC to all your emails you send to people to keep track of activity, to-do, and background information. Provides a way to add comments.

For Projects with a lot of tasks, I use Basecamp from 37signals. Why? It’s clean, easy to use, hosted, and a great API for 3rd party developers.

A communication tool to let others know what is going on. Blogs are the default now. I personally chose Wordpress as the open source solution for all my sites. There are other tools such as Twitter, which I also use, but with a Funnel back to my company blog. If you want you can follow me here at http://twitter.com/tolsnet.

Now back to automation. Take each one of these minimum essential tools, and take away the maintenance. Eliminate the tools that cause out-of-sync issues. Pick a solution that has a growth and drive that is open, sharing, and simple.

This is a continuation of the post Automation And Reduce

Where is the peaceful time to innovate, create that new process to save time, money, and material. Invent a new product, decide where your business is going to go or your personal growth?

I’ve been working on automating my life every since I can remember. Why be bothered with the mundain, repetative non productive tasks? Lets start with preserving our files we have, and pictures that we can’t loose. Need to consolidate and backup your files. If there are pictures, put them in a folder called pictures. I go to the extra degree of creating a year sub folder, and month sub folder. That’s a little overboard, but I get pictures from different sources, and dates of the pictures don’t always match. You could use what Microsoft Windows gives you by putting them into the pictures folder of your MyDocuments. But every application knows about that and clutters it up with junk. So I create a new MyDocuments folder in the C:\ drive. Then create a Pictures sub folder. I know what goes in there and the Windows Documents is a throw away.

I keep my Business and Personal files seperate. Seperate by a folder. So if there is Work, I’ll create a SubFolder of my new Documents location, and create subfolders in there where appropriate. This is a good start. Live with this for awhile, let it get to be a habbit. And Backup the new Documents location using a secure, encrypted, Online Backup. I recommend Data Deposit Box. I recommend them for a couple of reasons. One is that it is very non-ubtrusive, works in the background, continiously backs up when your not working. No more, once a day interuption of it backing up.

This will be a multi-part article, this is the first step to making your data organized, and automating your life, so you can spend it more productively by innovating more.

Now is the time to take action. You simply cannot continue to do things the same way and expect different results, especially in this down economy. You will not survive.

Your primary focus, if your business is living on the edge between a red or black bottom line, should be cash flow. And to increase cash flow you have to sell. Anything that takes you away from selling is a threat to your cash flow. 

That’s why when I read the recent Intuit “Get Paid” survey results, I just shook my head. The survey was conducted in early October 2008 and included responses from 751 small business owners with less than 10 employees.

According to the results, 66 percent of small businesses still handwrite invoices, use word processing programs and spreadsheets, or simply don’t have a standardized method. 

Are you one of those businesses? It’s time for a change. You can sign up for online invoicing tools that will cost you about 10 bucks a month. Or you can use the free Billing Manager version provided by Intuit. Your time is worth more than 10 bucks a month. And if you’re spending your time manually invoicing, you’re not selling so you suffer a double whammy — you’re costing your business money and you’re not available to make a sale.

And here’s the case for outsourcing to an expert. Nearly 20 percent of small business owners admit to forgetting to invoice or follow up on an overdue invoice. Over 50 percent of these respondents admit that they are simply “not organized” and “lack an automated system for creating and tracking invoices.”

Ack! Find someone to take care of this for you now. Would you want to tell a bankruptcy judge you just were “not organized” and that’s why your business failed? How embarrassing would that be? You can find a reasonably priced virtual assistant who can handle this for you. That way you don’t have to worry about being disorganized and you can spend all of your time focusing on pumping up your bottom line by selling your heart out.

You can do your business a whole lot of good — and increase those sales too — simply by accepting credit cards. According to the survey, only 30 percent of small businesses accept credit cards and only 22 percent accept electronic checks. The most common forms of payment are standard checks with 85 percent followed by cash with 59 percent. People don’t carry much cash these days and plenty of them couldn’t find a check if they tried. And 20 percent of small businesses admit to having lost a customer because they could not accept credit cards. Don’t let that be your business.

If you’re serious about making the most of your cash flow, take a hard look at the things you are doing in your business. I bet you find at least one thing you can change by automating or outsourcing. Why not do that now and let me know what you found by leaving a comment. Or if you have a tip to offer, tell me about that too.

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About the Author: Denise O’Berry is a small business expert who provides tools, tips and advice to help small business owners be successful. O’Berry is the author of “Small Business Cash Flow: Strategies for Making Your Business a Financial Success” and Founder of the Minding Your Own Business online network. Her blog can be found at Just for Small Business.

From Small Business Trends

To Survive This Economy You Must Automate Your Small Business