What about small business? The good news is if you are a small business owner, there are plenty of short- and long-term benefits from virtualization-and you don't need a big budget.

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This newsletter is designed for you, a business computer user. You will not find any deep dives into the speeds and feeds of the latest technology marvels. Rather, the articles are written in plain English to satisfy the curiosity of people like you.

The Old Way
Let’s face it: these darn computers are more integrated with our daily work lives than we ever expected. One way to demonstrate this is an unscientific study of “the old way.” Stop and listen to any office environment and within the first hour or two you will likely hear an employee refer to “the old way” of executing some business process. Why do we call it “the old way?” What has changed? The answer usually lies in some systems advancement wherein either countless administration hours were rescued from an inefficient process or better (read: more organized) business information begins flowing to those folks who need it most. Each time we hear about “the old way” we should be encouraged to look for other outdated processes in our businesses. Gigabytes is produced, in part, to instigate more of these moments of “Aha!” where we establish our vision for “the new way.”

But Where’s My Data?
By now, most of us have also experienced the horror and helplessness associated with a data loss incident (or at least a near miss). These can be career-changing moments, right? As digital becomes our sole source of information storage for many business processes, the emotional and financial fallout of such incidents cannot be simulated. There’s two types of people in the IT world, those who take their backups seriously and those who haven’t yet lost data. It’s just something you have to experience to fully comprehend. The articles in Gigabytes will highlight practices and technologies that reduce the occasion and duration of data loss and other interruptions to business operations.

Gigabytes
Gigabytes' purpose is to instigate long-lasting increases in your daily productivity. As you read Gigabytes each month, we encourage you to take a step back and reevaluate the way you currently work with your computer(s). We encourage you to set aside 30 minutes (without email/phone calls to interrupt you) and watch a few of the linked training videos (hey, they’re free). Lastly, we urge you to call on your contacts at PCS to explore the possibilities of any technological opportunities Gigabytes might help inspire.

Gigabytes is being distributed to all PCS clients (past, present, and future) and other admired colleagues. Since you are receiving this edition, someone at PC Solutions is awfully fond of you. If you would prefer not to receive these monthly messages from PC Solutions, please click on the safe unsubscribe link at the end of this message. Lastly, if you have any topics you would like us to cover or would like for your organization to be the subject of one of our future editions of Gigabytes, please contact me directly: cgeiser@pcstechnology.com

To your continued success,
Chris Geiser
 

PC SOLUTIONS CASE STUDY: TIERNEY BROTHERS
PC SOLUTIONS WORKS SEAMLESSLY WITH INTERNAL STAFF

Outsourcing your IT really pays off if you do the math. Sandy Livingston, IT Manager at Tierney Brothers, Inc., did the math. She calculated the cost of salary, benefits, vacation time, sick time, office space and equipment – not to mention supplementing skills with the right vendor when your employees lack the specific skills you need. What she found was that it made more economic sense to outsource the IT managed services function to PC Solutions (PCS).
PC Solutions brings brings high level expertise to watch over the details while keeping an eye on the big picture.

Established in 1977, Tierney Brothers is an industry-leading audio-visual systems design and integration firm based in the Twin Cities that employs 100 employees in two locations. Livingston started out working with PCS in 2004 as “fill-in,” she says, to supplement the skill sets that were lacking in their own staff. Over the course of Livingston’s tenure, the IT department has fluctuated from one to as many as four people. When it was time to hire another help desk technician, Livingston interviewed for two weeks.

During this process, she realized she was using the engineering talent of PCS more and more on a time and materials basis for both scheduled visits and ad hoc projects to augment their internal IT resources.
 

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Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 is for presentations and Office OneNote 2007 is for notes. Since you can't have a presentation without notes, it always amazes me how few PowerPoint users think to use OneNote to help them organize and share their information.

One of the new features in OneNote 2007 is the ability to "print" your documents and files to your pages in OneNote. You can do this from just about any Windows program by using the "Send to OneNote" printer. The power of the combination comes in what you send over to OneNote and what you can do with what has been sent.

OneNote and PowerPoint for the participant

At the most basic level, you can send your PowerPoint slides to a section in OneNote. Open the presentation in PowerPoint and select Print. At the bottom of the Print dialog, select Slides from the Print What drop-down.
 

Read the full instructions