When I meet with Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing prospects, I often tell them that the most critical element of a solid relationship between Port-to-Port Consulting and them is the level of trust we have for one another. I tell them that we can't be successful together unless we trust each other. When we find a sour relationship between us and one of our network support customers, it's almost always because we or they have lost trust in the other.

I have a new IT outsourcing customer right now who is having an issue with trusting us. His previous provider turned out to be very untrustworthy. These guys did things that verge on criminal. We came in and went right to work correcting all that we could. We even brought in a competing company to help with an area where they are much stronger than us. One of the things we needed to change right away was their telephone service provider. We started by asking their Internet service provider to quote the addition of telephone service, thus reducing the number of vendors and lines to manage. The vendor was excited for the opportunity to get additional business until the sales rep discovered that her company couldn't (or wouldn't) provide the SIP trunking that we needed. When she told us that, we expressed our regret and told her we'd use a different provider. We also told her that their inability to provide this service would be a hindrance to their success at renewal time.

She must have taken that as a threat. Her next move was to call my new computer network consulting customer and tell him how technically inadequate our solution was and to offer her "much better" solution. In this case, much better meant she gets a commission. My new client didn't know what to do. I simply asked him to trust the people he hired to take care of this for him.

The episode completely destroyed any trust I had in this particular sales rep, and it soured my view of her company. When Port-to-Port Consulting thought there was a better solution for this customer than ours, we brought that solution to the table, even though we will make no money for doing so. If you find yourself double checking every recommendation from your IT outsourcing provider, then you probably don't trust him. It's time to make a change.

When I started Port-to-Port Consulting in 1991 the Internet was nothing like today, nor was email. I had had an email address in my previous company but it really was only good for sending messages to other people within my company. To communicate electronically with friends and family, there was Compuserve, and in a few places, AOL or Prodigy. All three of these were dial-up services. I still remember people telling me that they would NEVER use a computer to conduct real business communications.

Jump ahead two decades and we find the average person writing about 40 and receiving nearly 150 messages per day and spending two and a half hours dealing with them even though nearly half just get deleted. I was an early adopter of email but I can't wait for it to go the way of the fax machine. There is too much crap, and I'm not just talking about spam. Sending email has become too easy so we whip them out without much thought. Compare the amount of time you spend composing an email to the time spent writing a letter.

Unfortunately, the likely replacements for email are worse in this regard. No time is spent thinking about the proper composition of a text message or IM or social media update. And really, as I tell my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers all the time, my complaint isn't with the beauty of the prose. It's with the volume! I don't care how much thought you put into composition. I'd rather you put thought into whether the email needs to be sent at all, and, just as importantly, who needs to be on the receiving end.

My wife complained that our friend Roger had not replied to an email she sent him. When I saw him I asked why he had shunned the woman I love. He leaned over the table and said, "She didn't send me an email. She CC'd me on an email to someone else." STOP using the CC line. Either you want the person to do something or you should give them back the 3 seconds it will take to delete the message. Just think:

CC = DELETE

and BCC says you're petty.

That's the end of my rant about email. If you want to read more about the impact on your workday, check out the infographic from Liz Hover.

I have an Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customer named Mark Zuckerberg. That's right, just like the Facebook guy. We call ours the "original" Mark Zuckerberg since he's older. I can't begin to tell you the mileage he's gotten out of the name confusion. He's been interviewed by international media outlets, and is something of a local celebrity here in Indianapolis. While Mark didn't set out to become famous for his name, he's used it to his advantage as he promotes his bankruptcy law office. Mark's good fortune at sharing a name with the social media wiz is something he couldn't have planned, but boy is it a lucky break.

So along comes the Oscars and Angelina Jolie sticks that bare leg out just a little bit more than normal. Do you think she expected the gesture would take off online? Of course not. She couldn't have planned a media blitz like that. I'm not sure it will provide direct benefit to her future marketability, but she's certainly getting more mention now than any other actress that might be in consideration for a part.

We spend a great deal of time and money promoting our Pertingo Computer Support services to organizations in central Indiana. Some of our best media coverage has come from things that were unplanned and out of our control -- luck. The same is true for acquiring new computer network consulting customers. Many of our long term clients came to us by strokes of luck rather than carefully planned and orchestrated activities.

If you're looking for IT support services in central Indiana, maybe this is your lucky day!

Among the many Indianapolis computer outsourcing customers that Port-to-Port Consulting supports are some Indiana Charter Schools. I also do a bit of volunteer work with community organizations that work with children. A common refrain in educational circles is the need for Lifelong Learning. Today's students need to understand that their education never ends. They must learn how to enhance their skills and build new ones in order to keep up with the expanding knowledge in the world. It strikes me that nowhere is this more true than in our small business computer consulting business. Everything that my computer network services staff knows today will be all but useless in a matter of months.

It's interesting also that none of our network support technicians see much benefit in the traditional classroom setting -- you know, the setup of most of our schools. Apparently the linear lecture based approach to teaching is one of the last choices when learning is important to you. We tackle learning in a variety of ways. Some of us need to have solitary time to read, experiment, and absorb new information. Others want to work thru it with a group and talk about it as we go. Still others prefer to dive in until they hit a roadblock, then go back for instructions. In the end, we all come together to share what we think we know until we either figure out that we've got it or someone heads back to study it some more.

Now I understand that this approach to learning may be a bit messy and hard to give a letter grade, but it sure does create knowledge that we can use. Information Technology in small businesses is critical to their success, perhaps more so than in larger organizations. We understand that, and we do all we can, in our various ways, to keep learning new things everyday that will help our computer network consulting customers be better at what they do.

We recently parted ways with a central Indiana small business computer outsourcing customer. We had provide their IT support services for several years. During that time they moved into larger space, completed the buy-out of another business, and expanded their reach to include an international presence. Throughout the entire time we provided their computer tech support, but the relationship never solidifed between our companies. At different times different people here at Port-to-Port Consulting would voice concerns about the way we worked with this organization. On each occasion, someone else would point out where there was something we could have said or done differently that might have prevented this strain in the relationship. We'd hash it out and decide that we should try harder to make this network support customer happier.

Finally, we realized during one of these hash sessions that the problem wasn't one of people or personalities, or even communication styles or knowledge: the problem was one of culture. You see our IT support services customer had a culture built around mistrust. In their industry, everyone was out to gouge you if they could. They didn't trust anyone to tell them the truth, and they rarely told the whole truth to anyone either, so we kept looking like patsies to them when we walked in and gave them the full story.

Their culture was so unaccustomed to our straightforward approach that they never believed we were telling them the truth. I tell people all the time that if you don't trust your advisor you should stop paying him and get one that you do trust. That's the message we finally had to give to this now-former client. It took us a long time to figure out why the relationship wasn't working because we looked for a person problem. In the end, the problem was compatibility.

Last February, I met with an Indianapolis area Not For Profit organization to discuss their computer network services needs. The organization was typical of many small nonprofits in that their computer network had been designed by one volunteer, built by a procession of other volunteers, and supported by no one really. They had reached a point where they realized the process of Information Technology management they were using was inadequate and wanted to discuss hiring professional computer network consultants.

Port-to-Port Consulting has a history of working with Not For Profits, and we usually try to provide a little extra when we work with them so I spent time with the staff and helped them develop a stopgap plan that would hold until they could develop a budget and plan for IT support services. Our conversations continued, on and off, for the rest of the year.

How surprising it was for me to receive an RFP for Computer Outsourcing Services from this very same agency a week or so ago. Small organizations should not use the RFP process for choosing an IT services provider.

1. They can't write one that will allow them to distinguish the differences between prospective bidders.
2. Most competent computer tech support providers will not go to the effort to respond for a small amount of work.
3. The relationship between the organization and the network services provider is far more important than most other elements, assuming all offerors are moderately competent.

There, I said it. If you're a small business looking for computer network consulting you need to face up to the fact that you don't need the smartest guy in the industry. Your network is actually pretty simple. In fact, its simplicity is what allows so many nearly-incompetent people to compete with good IT outsourcing companies. They only have to make it appear that your network is working and you'll never know the difference -- at least not for a long time.

Now I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't do your homework. Talk to several providers and their current clients. Make sure you feel a connection with the company. Evaluate the fit between your culture and theirs. But don't write an RFP. The same volunteers who created your scary network are going to evaluate the responses. If they were as good as that, you wouldn't be looking for better help.

Pick your guy and then negotiate an agreement, or ask everyone you liked to provide a proposal.

My friend Robert Kyslinger runs a good computer network services company in Houston called Omnipotech. He is fond of branding his products and services by using the prefix "omni" in front of it. While I enjoy making fun of the consistent way in which he does this, I realize that he's onto something. Having a consistent name can help people remember your company. However, it is possible to over do that -- hence our teasing of Robert.

One of the problems that the many different Android tablet devices face is the wide variety of names for them. In a sense, the tablet world is divided into 3 camps: iPads, Android devices, and the hopefully-coming-soon Windows 8 devices. While Apple is busy readying for the release of the 3rd version of the iPad, the Android world is chasing a way to get their devices recognized by name. I've played with dozens of them and I can only name a handful. The problem is so bad that Amazon seemed to go to extra effort to avoid calling their device an Android tablet. In the process they have done what I believe is significant damage to their Kindle brand by prepending it to the Fire, but that's how bad they didn't want to be lumped into the other Android tablets. More than 100 tablets have been introduced since the arrival of the iPad.

So when my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers ask me about the potential for tablets in their organizations, I tell them it is inevitable that they will be using tablets at some point because their people will start bringing their devices to work (BYOT). I also tell these IT support services customers that the only platform that has enough history to consider right now is the iPad. Any of the dozens of Android tablets could be gone in a matter of weeks.

2012 will be the year that tablets come into popular use in small businesses around central Indiana. The Pertingo computer support services customers that Port-to-Port Consulting works with will be ready.

When I attended the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology back in the 80s, we were required to learn three programming languages: BASIC, Fortran, and Assembly. The truth is we were required to write some fairly simple programs in each of these languages to prove that we could figure out how to look up the command syntax. Later I learned C and a little bit of Pascal. Shortly after that, the mouse became relevant and event-driven programming became important. I discovered that I tend to think in straight lines and I abandoned all hope of writing software.

Boy am I happy now. New programming languages appear and disappear at such a rapid rate these days that a good programmer's skills may be obsolete before he finishes his first project. The growth is driven by advances in processor technology and, of course, advances in the web.

As we work with our central Indiana small business computer outsourcing customers on the strategic level of their IT systems, we often have discussions about writing custom software. In the past, it wasn't necessary to obsess about the development language. Today, a bad choice of language could mean an orphaned application in just a few short years. New programmers don't want to learn the dying languages. They want to be on the front edge of the new ones.

Most small businesses shouldn't be writing custom software anyway. Someone out there has already taken a stab at the problem facing you right now. Find them and use what they did if at all possible. Now even this advice is suspect. My IT support services customers need to know that the specialty software they use to run their business will continue to be supportable as time goes on. The same holds true of cloud based services. The original version of Facebook was written in Cold Fusion. Without the influx of venture capital, it's unlikely that their transition to the many languages used today could have been done.

If you're considering new specialty software or cloud based services, be sure to have your IT support services provider check into the viability of the programming language used to develop your software.

Now that the NFL season is in Playoffs, everyone in central Indiana is thinking about the hoards of people who will descend on us in early February to watch the Super Bowl. Our host committee has done a fabulous job of preparing for the onslaught of people who will spend that week here in Indianapolis. We here at Port-to-Port Consulting have started thinking about the impact of all of these visitors on our routine that week. Many of our small business computer outsourcing customers are also starting to wonder. One of my downtown Indianapolis clients told me that their parking garage has informed them that their monthly passes will be no good during the Super Bowl week. They don't know where they'll park, or what it will cost them.

For all of the companies to which we provide IT support services, there are some remote access capabilities. At least enough for our computer help desk staff to connect for maintenance and troubleshooting. For many, the remote access capability is more robust. We're talking to others about enhancing their remote access in advance of the Super Bowl. For the average office worker these days, the ability to work remotely is relatively inexpensive to provide. We add this capability to many of our computer network services customers after the first big snow storm each winter.

Because we know the date for the big game, we can get ahead of the traffic bottlenecks it will cause by making sure that our customers in downtown Indianapolis have a way to work without leaving home. Thank goodness getting them to come back afterwards is not our problem.

With the possible competition of Social Media, Cloud Computing has been the question on the minds of my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers in 2011. How can you not think about it when you're being bombarded by "to the Cloud!" commercials during prime time television? I've told many of my Pertingo IT support services clients that even though the name is cooler, cloud computing is just a re-branding of things that didn't have great names before: client-server, ASP, SaaS, and others.

The reality is that anything you do where the processing (or the bulk of it) is happening on a machine other than the one you're sitting in front of can be considered Cloud computing. A phrase my computer support technicians have used is "Cloud in the Closet" to explain to some of our network support customers that they already have some of their computing in the cloud because their server in the closet is doing the processing for them.

The reality is that cloud computing is a way to trade one set of limiting factors for another. Smart small business owners will work with their computer network consulting provider to develop a plan for testing parts of their system against cloud alternatives. The best time to consider this is when critical IT infrastructure nears its replacement date. It's easier to make the switch to avoid a big capital expense than to switch and be left with a piece of equipment that has no purpose.

We have yet to find one of our computer outsourcing customers that can go completely to the cloud, but every one of them has something worth considering for moving out. You probably have something too.

A well kept secret among the companies that provide small business computer outsourcing services is that the majority of people working in their tech support positions have little or no formal education in the area of IT support services. They are mostly self-taught tinkerers, or vendor-created "certified engineers." Not that I'm knocking the need to learn thru experience and tinkering. Some computer network support concepts can only be understood by building a network and then breaking it and seeing if it can be fixed. However, having spent 4 grueling years earning a real engineering degree, I'm a bit put-off by the flipant use of the engineer designation after passing a couple of multiple-guess questions, no matter how hard they might be.

An unintended downside of this industry full of people who are eager to chase the next great idea. Afterall, if the company that certified you thinks you should be moving in a new direction, who are you to argue. This, I believe, is what creates the compter network services of the month. Right now, there are two related IT services being built up by the hype: Cloud Computing and Virtual Desktops. I'll leave the Cloud for another discussion. It's the Virtual Desktop that has my ire now. While there are instances where this makes absolute good sense, those aren't most of the situations in which my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers find themselves most often. Virtualized desktops work best in environments where lots of people use their computers for nearly exactly the same small set of tasks. That doesn't describe most small business network environments.

Even if it did, we've found that the cost of outfitting the proper network infrastructure to support reliable desktop virtualization is comparable (if not larger) than the cost of doing things to "old fashioned way" of buying regular desktops and a file server. However, the cost of support may be higher because the "engineers" who support your virtual environment have more certificates than the other guys.

A good computer network consulting company will take the time to evaluate the latest craze to see if it really fits your needs. Ask lots of questions when offered something new.

One of the services that Port-to-Port Consulting provides to its Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers is registration and management of their domain names. On the surface, this seems like a simple thing, but we've found that many people involved in IT support services don't understand much about the magic of Internet domains. The most recent example of this problem is one of the worst we've seen. We have a new Pertingo computer network services customer whose previous tech support guy died suddenly. As we began to unravel the many things that were not documented about their system, we discovered that the previous IT guy had registered their domain using his name and company as the registrar. Consequently, we could not take control of the domain to make the changes necessitated by their merger with another group.

Since nothing at the registrar indicated a connection to my new network support client, we couldn't even talk to the registrar about the problem. When we told them the previous guy had died suddenly, they said that they could give access to his heirs if provided with proof of death, but that wouldn't help us. The grieving widow has been unreachable, so my customer has had to engage attorneys to fight to get control of their domain, which they paid for when the previous guy registered it.

We often see similar situations when we win a new Pertingo customer. Usually, a series of calls to the person who did the original registration, along with some tutorials from the registrar gets everything straightened out -- unless the original person is dead. If done properly, the domain should be registered with your company and a contact in your company as the Registrant. If your IT support services provider is going to manage the domain settings for you, he should be listed as the Technical Contact, and either of you can be the Administrative Contact. Under no circumstances should you let your network consulting provider be listed as the Registrant. When he tells you it must be done that way, he's misinformed and you should make sure his skills in other areas of IT are not as poor.

If you didn't register your domain yourself, you should check right now to confirm that it really is registered to you. You can do this using any number of whois websites. We often use whois.net. If you aren't listed as the Registrant, make whoever has control of it make the chang immediately. There is NO good reason why someone other than you has to be listed as the Registrant.

I have been providing small business computer outsourcing in the Indianapolis area for more than 20 years. In that time I've worked with hundreds of businesses and not for profit organizations. Most were transitioning from one form of computer network support to another. Either they had an internal guy or two, or they were using one of my local network consulting competitors, or they had been relying on the kindness of someone close to the to keep them running and had worn out their welcome with them.

In all cases, one of the services high on the list to discuss was the computer help desk. It's one of the most visible parts of good IT outsourcing, even though we'd all like for it to be unnecessary. As a small business computer network consulting customer, you want your staff to be able to get their work done without having to reach out for IT support. As the IT support services provider, I want my staff to be working on more strategic and impactful issues with your Information Technology. Yet we both know that times will come when help is needed. The challenge for us both is to be sure that our Help Desk services don't become the landing place for all of the problems created by the other elements of a competent IT outsourcing engagement.

Frequently, poor planning and communication causes the compute Help Desk technicians to become burdened with calls that make them become defensive. When this happens, your Help Desk starts to hurt your business operations. Here are four ways this can happen:

1. The Help Desk staff forgets their main purpose. This problem is usually caused by heavy handed measurement on the part of the Help Desk management. If the help desk techs are measured by the amount of time they spend on each call, or how many calls they complete each day, or how many issues they resolve (as measured by their close rate), they will have a tendency during stressful times to get off the phone with their network support customers quickly, or to declare problems solved prematurely. This usually leads to repeat calls from the poor customer who still can't work, but it's a new issue from the monitoring standpoint.

2. The Help Desk staff doesn't listen. This is the expert error. People who are very familiar with a subject tend to try to jump ahead to the answer instead of listening to the problem. This is why your Help Desk technician starts fixing your email connection when your problem is opening an email attachment. She heard email and went to work.

3. The Help Desk staff doesn't tell you what's happening. Computer tech support involves a troubleshooting process that sometimes amounts to trial-and-error. Your network support technician doesn't want to tell you all of the things he's trying or eliminating. He only wants to tell you the successful solution. As a result, you feel as if you're being kept in the dark. You are. Good support people will tell you what they're doing and why.

4. The Help Desk staff won't admit when they're stumped. Since you're paying for the expertise of your computer technical support, many providers have a fear of admitting that they don't know how to fix your problem. As a result, they say things that are packed with jargon and techno-speak in an attempt to make you feel like they have a clue.

Watch out for these issues as you deal with your computer outsourcing provider. Call them on it when you notice these behaviors. Remember that many are just habits that need to  be monitored.

I got a call the other day from a friend who owns a clothing store. He sometimes calls me when he's having computer problems. Port-to-Port doesn't work in retail establishments but we have a few friends who ask us to sanity check what they hear from their computer tech support professionals.

In this case, the computer that runs the POS was unresponsive. They had called their software company and been told that it was a bad motherboard. I stopped by and quickly determined that the problem was a bad power supply. I shared this happier assessment with my friend and told him to pass it on to his computer help desk guys so they could be prepared when they came out. He did.

The next day, my friend called me to tell me that my diagnosis was correct and his IT support services technician had replaced the power supply and gotten the computer working again. I expressed my joy at having been able to help when he said, "That wasn't the end of the story."

He went on to relay how his computer network services guy had replaced the power supply, turned on the machine, watched it boot, and then packed up and left. It wasn't until he was out the door that they got logged in and discovered that the computer wouldn't talk to the receipt printer. Attempts to reach their network support tech were unsuccessful so they were left with a computer that worked but they couldn't use. Luckily, a customer with some network consulting experience volunteered to help out and managed, after more than an hour, to get the printer working.

Situations like this play out everyday in the Indianapolis computer outsourcing arena. Technicians finish their work at the point right before their customer starts his work. The result is one side who believes the work is successful and the other side who is extremely frustrated that he still can't work. Good computer tech support happens when the provider understands the real reason he has a job.

Ever since Microsoft released Windows 3.0 with Solitaire included I've found myself frequently having conversations with my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers about restricting employees' access to certain applications. Lately the conversation revolves more around access to certain Internet sites. The purpose is always to get employees to focus their energy on getting work done instead of personal activities. In the Windows 3.0 days I made the argument that letting your staff play Solitaire is a form of Mr. Miyagi training. Solitaire was designed to force the player to use the mouse. Clicks, double clicks, drag-and-drops -- these were transferable skills just like "Wax on. Wax off."

With the advent of virus inflicting websites, I started supporting my network support clients to manage where employees can go to avoid gunking up the network. If people just click their way around the Internet without some kind of supervision they will surely rain damage down in the whole network and lead to the need for lots of computer network services to get things going again.

Today, I sit on the fence between the two camps. I say let your employees do their holiday shopping online, as long as they are reasonable in their use of time and do the shopping at sites with name recognition. Sure, there are some risks to both productivity and network security, but neither should be at great risk. First, if your staff has so little to do that they can spend hours shopping online, then you've got a business and management problem that can't be solved with Information Technology. Second, if the shopping is restricted to the major sites, the risk of attracting a virus is pretty slim. Finally, no matter what you do, a third of your employees are going to shop online at work anyway. Why not deal with it head on.

If you think my stance is extreme, you'll be more shocked than I was to read this. I talked with a prospect for our Pertingo Computer Support service last week and he described his biggest problem to be cleaning viruses off his network from his staff porn surfing. I assured him we could reduce that to nearly nothing and identify those who refused to stop. He told me that would be detrimental to morale since his folks worked a lot and they were unable to porn surf at home. He just wants to keep the network virus-free as they do it.

We won't be providing computer network consulting to that organization.

When I started Port-to-Port Consulting back in 1991, I did a speaking circuit to drum up business. In my canned speech, I discussed the next great things that were going to happen in technology. All of the things on my list were essentially available at the time, although incredibly expensive and kind of kludgy. Here we are 20 years later and one of those items is still "coming soon." Without question, we get closer to being able to talk with our computers every year, but I am amazed at how difficult this task has proven. Note I say talk with, not talk to, our computers. The difference defines the difficulty.

So, even though I continue to tell my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers that they will one day be able to talk to their computers, I no longer predict it as the next user interface. That will undoubtedly be your fingers. The mouse and stylus will give way to the fingers and hands. The release today of the latest iOS reminds me of that fact. Apple and their finger gestures began the death of the mouse. Microsoft will release Windows 8 sometime next year, and it resembles the Windows 7 Phone interface, which is far more finger friendly than anything Microsoft has done before.

Fear not, consumers of computer network services, I still include a line about talking with your computer in my stump speech. I don't deliver it with the force of conviction that I used to have though.

My wife is an avid reader. She cruises thru books at a blistering pace. One would think her to be an expert on language because of her high interaction with the written word. But she's not. I frequently have flashbacks from junior high school English class and I present these nightmarish questions to her, like, "How many of the being verbs can you name?" Or, "Can you tell me the 12 different verb tenses?"

While my reading speed is far nearer to the pace of the tortoise, my mind has wrapped around some of these archaic elements of the language and refuses to let go. Mrs. Donna Massey still rings in my ears when I do things like beginning a sentence with a preposition, which I did in the previous paragraph.

If you were trying to find someone to help you with your grammar and you came across me and Susie, it would be easy for her to convince you that her vast experience with English thru reading makes her a far more qualified expert than me. You'd be wrong! She couldn't even come up with 10 being verbs, and her tenses stopped at past, present, and future.

This same mistake is common when it comes to Indianapolis small business owners selecting someone to provide good computer outsourcing. Without a solid way of determining which of their prospective network support providers is best qualified, they resort to evidence that might ferret out the better choice. Be cautious of using the wrong measures. Like my dear wife, many computer tech support companies might appear qualified because of time they've spent doing something close to computer network consulting. Better put, time spent sitting in front of a computer doesn't equate to expertise at operating a computer network.

A recent Gartner report on the status of Gmail for the enterprise contained a recommendation against moving your organization's email to the cloud right now. Gartner thinks the smart move is to keep an in-house email server thru one more generation, or until about 2014. Here at Port-to-Port Consulting, we agree with a few exceptions. For the most part, email has become vital to the operation of even the smallest small businesses. Right now, cloud based email is built on a platform for supporting consumer use, which is far more casual than business use. In addition, many new entrants into the enterprise hosted email space have already exited. Others, like Microsoft, are still making wholesale changes to their offering including basic things like the name and cost of the service.

Where we believe exceptions exist are the organizations that are further along the line toward being virtual. The kind of small business that has an office location more for collecting mail and packages than housing its staff. The other notable exception is for companies whose staffs are very dispersed. If not many people come into the office, then the majority are dealing with cloud-based email anyway. It's Cloud-in-the-Closet, but it still has all of the downsides of cloud computing.

For the rest of the companies who use computer outsourcing and IT support services, the best bet is still to run your mail server inside your office, while keeping your eye on cloud based developments and considering the move to the cloud at the time of your server upgrade after next.

I have always been a gadget geek. Even before I was an Indianapolis computer consultant, I tended to be the first person I knew to have the latest portable. Heck, my first Palm Pilot was my fourth PDA. Back in the days before Port-to-Port Consulting, I thought the computer tech support people were being a big pain in my behind when they told me that I couldn't connect my device to the corporate network. I figured they were too lazy to take the time to figure it out.

When later, I became an IT support services provider, I realized that the issue is bigger than that. Supporting an assortment of devices with varying capabilities makes a small business computer network more difficult to manage. Besides, the company is providing the network services necessary to get the job done, right?

In the 20 years that I've been providing computer outsourcing, I've waffled on that fence. I do believe that most business owners work hard to provide the IT infrastructure necessary for their employees to do their jobs. However, I have found that some employees have really good ideas about tools that will make it even easier to do their jobs. As the provider of computer support services, I need to help them too.

Lately, that assistance has become a significant part of our computer help desk operations. More and more personal devices are coming into the workplace. Everything from smartphones to laptops to tablets. We see digital recorders and GPS navigators and all sorts of other things. Even though these devices were designed for personal or consumer use, the people we talk to have pretty good arguments for how the devices can help them do their jobs.

The trend is growing as more innovation happens in consumer electronics, and in web-based services. Good IT consulting providers need to become familiar with more of these devices and become more open to helping people integrate them into their work environment, while protecting the company's property, including sensitive data. That's what Port-to-Port is trying to do.

I was meeting with a prospective small business computer outsourcing customer yesterday when she asked what kind of advice I might offer about the future of Information Technology in small businesses. I told her that I believe the end of the PC era is upon us. It's been 30 years, to the day, since IBM released the first PC. Your TV remote has more processing power than that computer had. She looked at me oddly.

I explained that we've not reached the end of the computer era, but the PC, as a big square box sitting on or under your desk, is at its end of life. The next phase in computer network services will be ushered in on portable devices: laptops, notebooks, tablets, phones, watches, whatever. Most of us rarely need the kind of computing power that would require us to have a box that was too large for us to carry around with us. The power issue is solved to a good enough degree. The web-enabling of applications (I have a hard time using "Cloud") further reduces the need for powerful processing.

So I found it interesting when I discovered in my email this morning a link to an article from NetworkWorld saying almost exactly what I had said yesterday. Mark Dean, who was a part of the original IBM PC team, made the same point.