We only have one customer who is not a business.
They are the sweetest elderly couple and they?ve called us for years.
Today I had one of their computers in because it was blue screening. It?s a custom built machine that originally had Windows 7 on it but has since been upgraded to Windows?8 and then Windows 10. With an SSD hard drive, it usually runs pretty well .. until the?day it got itself stuck in a reboot loop.
The email subject read: The biggest announcement since Apple removed the headphone jack.
How do you break it to a group of friends that you�re leaving them, after 12 years?
We were just honest.
After 12 years of trading, Tony & I announced that we would be graduating from the international Computer Troubleshooters franchise, effective 1 Oct.
I use the word graduating intentionally. The Computer Troubleshooters group has been with us since we started our own business in a new country, pre-kids, without the support of our corporate technical peers and hoping that we could make this work financially to be our primary source of income. We�ve learnt so much in that time about business, about tech and about each other.
This week a few of my interests have collided – Microsoft Australia’s annual Partner Conference, ProBlogger’s annual conference and Xero’s Xerocon South conference.
As much as I hate to be missing out on the announcements and tech goodness from Microsoft, or the hugely engaging ProBlogger fun, Xerocon South won me over for a few reasons.
It’s in my city (yay for my own bed). It’s the first time they’ve had a combined Australia + New Zealand conference. And I’ve been talking lately to a few Cloud-friendly accountants and bookkeepers. Yes, I’m going to hang out with the financial crowd. Wish me luck!
For small businesses, Cloud solutions seem to deliver innovation, productivity and profitability with ease.
You don’t have to sit around and wait for the “I.T. guy” to install something on a server, then install something else on your computer. It’s all enabled by just signing up to a service in your web browser and entering your credit card number. The secure access, reliability and backups are all handled behind the scenes.
As part of the?Tech Field Day Extra?crew at?Interop 2016, I got to sit in on a great presentation by?Avi Freedmanfrom?Kentik.
I?d?never heard of them, which is not surprising given my Australian-based SMB world, but I sat with an open mind as Avi talked about Enterprise (and larger) networking concepts. It?s always so great when a presenter makes it ?real world? enough that you can see the benefits, without necessarily understanding all the tech under the hood. Seems that the world is hearing about Kentik though as their customers already include yelp, Pandora, Box, and openDNS.
What is it about going away that makes the world throw a dozen deadlines at you at once??🙂
Now the main ones have been tackled, it?s time to get my thoughts published regarding Interop 2016, which I had the pleasure of speaking at.
It?s always scary speaking at a conference that you?ve never attended before, as you don?t know if your content will hit the mark. I?m pleased to report that there was a great mix of topics at this event ? from higher level ?what?s the future?? discussions to deep dive technical sessions.
We?ve seen some strange ?attach file? behaviour in Outlook 2016 installed via Office 365 ProPlus.
Specifically, when you click on the Attach File icon, the dropdown menu of Recent Items and other locations disappears, rolling back up. You can?t actually attach a file.
This behaviour appears when Outlook updates the Recent Items list.
As part of the?Tech Field Day Extra?crew at?Interop 2016, I got to sit in on a great presentation by?Avi Freedmanfrom?Kentik.
I?d?never heard of them, which is not surprising given my Australian-based SMB world, but I sat with an open mind as Avi talked about Enterprise (and larger) networking concepts. It?s always so great when a presenter makes it ?real world? enough that you can see the benefits, without necessarily understanding all the tech under the hood. Seems that the world is hearing about Kentik though as their customers already include yelp, Pandora, Box, and openDNS.
Warning: This is an opinion piece and quite honestly, a rant. You have been warned.
Our business has been supporting the technology needs of SMBs for 12 years now, after we stepped out of the corporate world. The early years were comparatively easy � a business wanted I.T. support, we�d upgrade a server or two to newer software and bigger hardware and the addition of remote monitoring and management tools consolidated our efforts across our customer base. Nothing really extraordinary there.
The catalyst for this post was a conversation with a bunch of great, smart people in IT about IoT. The general consensus was that the term meant different things to different people and had fallen victim to its own hype. Sound like any other computing term you know � (Cloud)?
It was then followed by a ton if hilarious examples about the weird things being connected to the internet (see�Twitter:Internet of Shit) and the inherent security concerns with all of this (see�Hello Barbie privacy fears�and also�Skynet)