Small Business Email & Office Networks

Have you outgrown your current systems (are you still trying to run your business on Windows 98)?  We can provide your business with a technology migration path that will specify when you should progress from separate, unlinked computers to a managed computer network with centralized file and data storage and communications. 

Small Business Email Systems

Are you still using a hotmail or yahoo email address to run your business? Having your own email address ([email protected]) makes you look more professional. Are you waiting minutes or hours to receive a document sent by your officemate? Or are you in one of the business areas that are subject to the new document retention and discovery provisions? If any of these is true, then it's time to upgrade to server-based email.

Server-based email is having your own separate email system just for your company. It's more secure because emails between employees never leave the office, and all emails can be backed up nightly (for reliability as well as to meet retention requirements). Having your own email server means you have ultimate flexibility of how your emails are routed. Want a public email address for "[email protected]" that deposits incoming messages into a common folder that can be read by all your sales staff? No problem. Want someone to be able to automatically forward their messages to someone else when they are on vacation? Again, no problem. You can also do more advanced things like receiving incoming faxes and voicemail messages as email attachments.

Small Business File Storage & Printing

If you're like many small businesses, you started operations with one or two separate PCs. Since then, you've maybe hooked up a small network to allow them to share an internet connection, but they still operate pretty much stand-alone. Each user's documents are stored somewhere on the C:\ drive, and each computer likely has its own attached printer. What happens when you need to exchange files? Are you emailing them to someone across the office because you have no easy way to share them? What happens when one of the hard disks crashes or is infected by a virus - have you just lost half of your business data? At some point, most businesses realize that their business data is critical and needs to be protected. The best way to do that is to implement a server-based network.

A server-based network centralizes many PC functions - user logins, file and document storage, printer sharing, network fax - and can take advantage of hardware reliability technologies such as RAID to make sure that information is not lost if there is a hardware failure. In addition, it provides additional flexibility in the way you run your business. These are only a few of the advantages - Let us show you more!

Information Management and Collaboration

Server-based networking also provides some other benefits for information management and collaboration. Have you ever had to review a document that someone else authored, make comments or changes, then give it back to them for final publishing? How do you keep up with which version is the correct one (especially if more than one person is reviewing)? The answer is a collaboration tool that keeps track of each version, who last saved it, and what changes were made.

Advanced collaboration tools allow employees - either across the room or across the country - to discuss documents in real-time and to each see the changes as they are made. They can also route documents along a review path, and keep track of the intermediate and final versions (in case you need that paragraph that someone else deleted three versions ago). Let us show you how there's more to life than emailing word documents around to your coworkers.