Cloud Services

We have found that our customers have found the following cloud services to be most beneficial to their businesses.

Google Apps

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Google Apps for Work has been a very cost-effective solution for those businesses that have large mailboxes, large shared folders that they want to make available to the web, or those who don’t otherwise have a strong affinity to Microsoft products. One of the greatest features of Google Apps for Work is the Gmail interface and Google Drive. These web apps are quick and responsive, making use of Google’s incredibly fast search technology. It is simple to add additional space in either Gmail or Google Drive for a small additional fee.

The downside of Google Apps for Work is that it is a little more difficult to integrate the email into Microsoft Outlook and some of the settings, such as Out of Office Notifications, need to be managed through the web interface as opposed to Outlook.

Microsoft Office 365

Office 365

Microsoft’s Office 365 offering has been improving over the last few years and is now a formidable competitor to Google Apps. There are three levels of business offerings: Office 365 Business Essentials, Office 365 Business, and Office 365 Business Premium. The differences come down to whether or not the business needs desktop versions of Office as well as fully hosted email.

The best part about Office 365 is that you can purchase your email, full desktop Office applications and a full collaboration platform (through SharePoint Online) for a low monthly fee. It also offers up to 1 TB of storage per user through OneDrive for Business.

The downside of Office 365 is when mailboxes approach 50 GB or if large file shares need to be synchronized with OneDrive, it can be problematic.

Office 365 also has a non-profit offering available in Canada.

Claritech Trust Bundle

The core of our offering is individual support incorporated within the Claritech Trust Bundle. By concentrating on the needs of the individuals in your organization, you can rest assured that they will be supported, no matter what their information technology needs. Our full service offering includes unlimited remote and phone support for each individual, regardless of the devices they use.  With the understanding that individuals don’t always leave their work at the office, we even include a home device for each of our supported individuals.

Trust

The Claritech Trust Bundle includes remote monitoring, inventory and antivirus for each of your devices as well as one home device for each user, all packaged together in one low per-user price.

Making IT simple

  1. Our personnel are customer focused and easy to talk to, both technically and interpersonally.
  2. We support all of your organization’s people through unlimited remote and phone support as well as user training.
  3. We leverage cloud-based applications and utilities to create a safer and more productive working environment.

Enhancing Value

  • Reducing data loss risk by focusing on security, backups and user training,
  • Managing vendor relationships and negotiating contracts,
  • Selecting and integrating systems and applications that will provide the most long-term value,
  • Providing cloud services such as Google Apps for Work and Office 365 to lower your infrastructure costs and increase productivity,
  • Using inexpensive, powerful web-based tools to monitor and pro-actively manage your technology infrastructure remotely.

How We Do It

  1. Review: capture the current state by performing an IT systems review;
  2. Envision: create a clear future state utilizing the business plan, philosophy and goals;
  3. Plan: facilitate the path to the future state through the development of a strategic IT plan;
  4. Achieve:  execute the plan through cost-effective, efficient project management combined with suitably skilled resources.

Hosted Email Distribution Lists – Sherweb fits the bill

We recently migrated one of our clients to Google AppsTM for Business from in-house Microsoft® Exchange.  Everything went pretty smoothly until it came to distribution lists for their email newsletters and announcements.

Here’s the issue:  While Google does a great job of processing distribution lists through Google Groups, these lists cannot be managed (or accessed) via Microsoft Outlook®. My requirements were simple:  give me a distribution list that I can pull up in an address book and edit it or expand it as needed. For example, if I have a list of my extended family, I’d like to be able to bring up that list in Outlook, expand it, and then delete the family members I don’t want to send to, based on my own criteria.  Ideally, it would be nice to be able to maintain the list in Outlook as well, but that’s not a priority.

It’s a simple requirement, but it turns out it’s not as easy to accommodate as one would think.  I did finally arrive at success, however, with Sherweb, an independent Exchange provider based in Quebec, Canada.  In this post, I’ll go through the three platforms I tested and describe the problems with distribution lists that I encountered:

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Yet another cool hosted service – Draftix.com

DraftixI recently had the opportunity to test another hosted service, Draftix.com.  I found it by searching for some software that would help with season ticket group distribution.  I was creating a new season ticket group of varying ownership and figured there had to be someone out there who’s already figured out how to do it easily using software or even Excel. 

After doing a quick Google or Bing (I’ve tried using Bing lately – maybe more on that in another post) I stumbled upon Draftix.  Interestingly, Bing provided the only direct path to Draftix- the second result, while Google (using the exact same “season ticket sharing software” query as linked to above) didn’t have a link to Draftix in the first 200 results (I gave up looking after 200).  Google’s second result did find a site (Vator.tv) that holds a review of Draftix that leads you to the Draftix site.  This is a perfect example of why relying on only one search provider (and Google is getting a lot of negative press about this lately) can limit your “view” of the Internet substantially.  An analogy would be if you rely 100% on one news service for all of your current events (The same kind of negative view a lot of people have of CNN.)Continue reading