Indianapolis IT Services

As I grow older, I find that some things aren't as easy as they used to be for me. I can't run as fast or as far as I used to. Just thinking about eating causes my waist line to expand. My arms just aren't long enough to hold the menus where I can read them. More and more people refer to me as "sir" than ever did before. I look at all of these things as the small price I must pay for living nearly half a century, except for my declining memory.

Now don't start thinking that senility is right around the corner for me. I'm still sharp enough to keep my Indianpolis small business computer network services customers up to date on the things that are happening in the IT industry that affects their businesses. I haven't forgotten my anniversary or anybody's birthday. I just don't have the quickness of recall that was once a hallmark of my personality. I have found that this problem isn't all bad. In fact, forgetting is an important thing for humans. Our memories don't work like computer hard drives. Although a new service connected to Foursquare is working on that, and another does it for Facebook.

By signing up for 4Squareand7YearsAgo.com, you will receive a daily email reminding you of the places you visited one year ago today. PastPosts.com does the same thing with your Facebook updates. It's like going back and reading your diary daily. Well, almost like it.

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.

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.

One of the features of the Pertingo service we provide at Port-to-Port Consulting is a computer help desk. When one of our Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers calls in with a problem, we log the issue into our internal tracking system where we keep notes on our actions to resolve the issue. After the tech support staff completes the resolution, our system sends an email to the customer telling them that we believe we've resolved it, and asking them to rate how we did. This request goes out for every single one of the hundreds of issues we resolve each day for our computer network support customers.

As is the case in most requests for ratings, the majority of our Pertingo customers don't respond to the survey request. We use the responses to evaluate the quality of our service, but we don't, as is so common these days, post how many stars we've been rated anywhere for anyone to see besides us. We truly want to know how we're doing so we can make efforts to improve.

There was a saying when I was in business school, "That which gets measured gets done." It was intended to be advice to measure what's important. I took it as a warning to measure as little as necessary. If there is a scoreboard, someone is trying to figure out how to scam it. And now, the Internet is littered with scoreboards. You can rate just about anything, or anybody. You can Like my comments on Facebook, or Favorite my tweets on Twitter. You can Rate my blog posts. And of course, you can rate the products or services of any business on any number of reputation sites like Yelp.

The other piece of advice I took away from MBA school was, "Just because you can measure something doesn't mean you should." Does it really help you to select a dishwasher if it has an average rating of 4 and a half stars from 47 people? How does that compare to the one that has only 4 stars but from 470 people? Useless data!

Go out and discover what you like on your own. Worry less about who's liking, retweeting, thumbs-upping, or starring you. Get along with yourself and let the stars fall where they will.

Did you ever wonder why all of the television networks seem to be showing the same shows at the same time. There was a period in the late 70s when westerns were hot. Then in the 80s it was sitcoms, followed by cop shows, and hospitals, followed by thrity-somethings who never seemed to work. Of course, then came night time game shows and reality TV. It's as if all of the network executives think it's better to have a me-too show than one that is original.

The same thing seems to be happening in the world of Cloud computing. I attended an Innovation Showcase held at Developer Town this week. It was an opportunity for smaller companies to pitch their new products with hopes of finding customers or investors. I was surprised at the lack of originality on display. Everyone had his own version of twitter, or Facebook, or DropBox, or you name it, but theirs was better than the more successful one. Really!

The same thing is happening with the big players. Google wants to be Facebook and Microsoft wants to be Google and Facebook wants to be Amazon and on and on. Hasn't anybody who is green-lighting these projects figured out that we, the customers, don't want any of them to be our single source for all things online? Why not work on making your product better instead? That's what we do here at Port-to-Port Consulting.

We are constantly looking for ways to be better at providing computer tech support and IT outsourcing services to central Indiana small businesses. Sure, we look at moving into other technology services or providing our computer network services to larger organizations. Every time we do, we realize that we don't bring anything special to those markets. We're really good at providing IT support services to small organizations and we think that's good enough.

I'm often asked by my Indianapolis small business computer services customers about the incredible abundance of spam. Their questions always come in a form like, "How is it possible for these guys to make any money doing this?" Thanks to researchers at UC San Diego, I can present a single example of how it happens. A research team highjacked a botnet and replaced the destination link with one of their own so they could see how many people clicked on the link to take advantage of the fabulous deal. In this example, the spammers would have generated about $7,000 per day selling fake Viagra at $70 - $225 per bottle. The true yield could be much more since the spammer now has valid credit card information on each of his victims.

It seems incredible doesn't it? The reality is that we're all gullible to some type of scam. When the cost to send billions of emails per day is virtually zero, one can take advantage of the extremely small number of people (in the extremely small number of people who will even get the email) who will seek the offer. And the numbers are very small, but look at how much spam gets thru all of the filtering you have in place. Should one of those pander to your penchant for discount dar chocolate truffles, you'll be hard pressed to stop that impulse to check it out.

I recently read a book by John Verdon called Think of a Number. In it the killer selects his victim using a smaller version of this same scam. By sending out a (relatively) large number of letters to potential victims in which he includes a sealed envelope with a number on it. In the accompanying letter, he tells his victim to think of a number, then open the envelope. Some percentage of the recipients will choose the number in the envelope. A smaller percentage of those will believe the sender has some sort of psychic connection and will follow his additional instructions. In the world of spam, the starting number is staggeringly huge.

My answer to the questions about spam that I receive frequently from my computer outsourcing customers is this, "We are the problem and spam won't stop until we all stop taking the bait."

Intego recently released VirusBarrier for iOS devices. While there have been some malware releases on iPhones they have mostly been restricted to those that are jailbroken. The normal iOS device is safer than its counterpart smartphones. Intego has taken a different approach in their attempt to get you to buy something you likely don't need. They are scanning files on your iDevice to see if they have malware that might affect your Mac or PC when you transfer them over. Clever! You know there are bad things that want to get onto your machine and your phone is an unwitting vector for that to happen.

In my 20 years providing computer tech support in central Indiana, I have seen more of my peers in the IT support services industry sell things thru fear than any other industry. Remember the crop of Y2K experts? Yes, there is a non-zero risk that someone somewhere will pass a virus to his computer via his phone. It's not even worth the $2.99 to protect yourself from a risk this small ... yet.

It looks to this Indianapolis IT Outsourcing provider like Google is taking a page from the marketing playbook of Apple with their rollout of Google Plus. They've created scarcity to get people excited about getting in. Just like Apple can count on long lines outside their store before they open, Google's limited entry into Google+ has created demand. I'm usually a pretty savvy buyer (although I did stand in line twice for iPhones), but this Google+ deal worked its magic on me. As soon as I found out that entry was limited, I just HAD to get in.

I'm in now, and like most of the people who are in early, I'm waiting for enough of my friends, family, co-workers, and others to get in so I can see what it can do. So far, I like it. But that like is based on the capabilities it is supposed to provide me. The latest of those features is freedom from non-people. Google has made it clear that they only want real people to create Google+ accounts. No businesses. No nonprofits. No schools. No organizations of any kind.

Don't think that Google is doing this for the purity of their social network. No, they have a whole set of business friendly features under testing that will give organizations more capability for analytics and connections to other Google business services, like AdWords. A few lucky businesses will begin to appear soon. Others who decide to create regular accounts will find them blocked or deleted as Google intends to avoid the confusion that was created when Facebook took too long to come up with a business solution that worked.

For now though, you can make repeated attempts to get into the Google+ network once you get an invitation. Then you can wait with the rest of us for a critical mass. I don't think it will take long.

Way back in 1986, Congress passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. This was ground breaking legislation at a time when very few people knew about the Internet and most electronic communication consisted of text transmitted over phone lines or faxes. Twenty-five years later, that piece of legislation doesn't help us (or the courts) figure out what to do about the plethora of Internet services, particularly those that hold our personal data.

It turns out that many jurists interpret the Fourth Ammendment (protection against illegal search and seizure) as not applying to your personal information that is stored on a machine owned by a third party and housed outside your home. This means that law enforcement officials can take a look at your gmail, or Dropbox files, or documents stored in Evernote or any of the thousands of other pieces of information out there without having to obtain a search warrant.

Now if you're like me, you probably don't have anything out there to get anyone excited about. Nonetheless, given enough scraps of information about a person's life will likely allow someone with malice of intent to create an interesting set of coincidences that can leave you uncomfortable explaining.

Recently, Senator Patrick Leahy introduced legislation to plug up this hole. Instead of trying to continuously update the laws for the new situations created by technology, why doesn't Congress pass legislation that says our bits should be treated just like our paper has been in the past with respect to the existing laws. That would make things easier for most of us.

Now that the transition to smartphones is in full swing, many central Indiana computer network consulting customers are finding that they have a new security risk in these "little computers" that are packed with data and easy to misplace. Our IT support services team here at Port-to-Port Consulting is always scanning for ways to enhance the security of our small business computer outsourcing clients. Recently, we came across a report detailing Symantec's review of the inherent security of the iPhone versus Android phones. It's not surprising to us that the iPhone wins that comparison. The nature of Apple's complete control of everything improves security immensely.

What was surprising was that the research found 200 vulnerabilities in the iOS. Many of these are extremely esoteric, but 200 means there are a lot of opportunities for hackers to manipulate your device. Of course, the iPhone's vulnerability increases dramatically for those of you who decide to jailbreak it.

Does this mean that you should ignore the Android devices in favor of an iPhone? I'm not ready to make that claim. As it stands, no serious smartphone malware has been found in the wild. Getting it onto your phone will require some social engineering. You can stay safe by minimizing the number of applications, particularly games, that you install.

Computer World recently reported the findings of an IDC study that states the amount of data stored on computer networks will grow by 50 times by 2020. In 2010, 1.8 zettabytes (that's 1.8 trillion gigabytes, or 1.8 times 1 followed by 21 zeroes). This data will continue to grow at an ever increasing rate as more of our things become "digitally aware". For example, how often do you get reports of your friends' runs or bike rides? That's because their shoes, or bike, or at least arm, have become able to track that information and report it. When it wasn't that easy, your friends didn't bother. Now imagine what that stream will look like as our clothes and appliances and cars start reporting in online.

Two things are important about this for our Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers. First, they are going to have a lot more data to manage and sort into useful information. Second, they are going to have a lot of data that needs to be secure against hackers and other n'er-do-wells. Both of these concerms will put incredible pressure on the computer network services required to do business.

At first glance, people say, "So what! Storage continues to get cheaper and cheaper." That overlooks the two important issues above. The time and cost required to sort and sift all of that data into information that is useful to your organization isn't nearly as cheap as the cost to store it. Neither is the cost to back it up in case of disaster. Even the processing costs may pale compared to the cost to your business of a data loss. Right now, about half of the data that should be protected has any protection at all.

At Port-to-Port Consulting, we know this is going to impact the organizations for which we provide computer help desk and IT support services. We've begun working with many of them to create data retention policies that can go a long way toward reducing how much data they have at any time. We're also investigating new and better ways to manage the data that must be kept so that it will be secure and available. Be sure that your network support specialists are doing the same.

The old adage that the customer is always right dates from the early 1900s when department store maven Henry Selfridge first coined it. We're in the second century of debating the validity of that statement. On a collective level it is true. Afterall, without customers we have no business. However, on an individual level, this is a bad rule on which to build one's customer service efforts. Port-to-Port Consulting's first touch point is our computer help desk. The men and women who staff our help desk provide some of the best computer tech support to be found. If you asked me what they could do to make their IT support services better, I would place refusing to help our computer outsourcing customers hurt themselves high on the list.

I view the computer network consulting services we provide to our Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers as a professional service. Professional services differ from other types of business services in that the providers have a special body of knowledge and skill that his customer does not. If I know more about the information technology than my customer, why would I allow him to direct the work? That's as negligent as letting your 10 year old drive the car even though he assures you he's had plenty of practice on his X Box.

Before you send me hate mail, let me say that, in the end, my customers do get to make the call on what happens with their information system and computer network. We know that our job is to be sure that the final decision is an informed one. Every now and then, we find a customer who consistently refuses to take our advice when making decisions. These are people who do not need (or do not want) our Pertingo services. In those cases, we tend to take the Herb Kelleher approach and let them know that they'll be missed.

One of the famous American sayings is that you should do work that you love. When I first told my daughter this, her response was, "There are too many jobs that no one loves for that to be good advice." As she often did when growing up, she had stumped me. It was several years before I had a good response to her observation. Here it is: You should do work that you love if you can. Otherwise, you should love why you do the work that you do. In the best cases, you do work that you love and you love why you do the work.

Believe it or not, that's how I view my work as an Indianapolis area small business computer outsourcing provider. I truly love the work that I do and I love the reasons that I do it. Most people view IT support as a dreary job performed by people who are semi-autistic idiot savants. Most of us are really nice people once you get to know us -- which might take a while. We provide computer help desk services and network support because we found that we love working with computers. We like solving the problem of figuring out what you actually told the computer to do when you thought you told it to send your document to the printer.

Even better in my case, I love having the chance to help people do whatever it is they do just a little better. My reason for providing IT support services is so that the people I work with can be better at whatever they've chosen to do, for whatever reason they've chosen to do it. The truly perfect storm happens when I get to provide IT outsourcing services to someone who is doing a job she loves for reasons that she loves. Shivers!

Not a week goes by in which one of the computer help desk technicians here at Port-to-Port Consulting doesn't have a conversation with one of our Indianapolis small busines computer outsourcing customers that ends with us having the strong desire to say, "I told you!"

We never actually say it because that would be ... well, rude. It happens a lot though. We work with dozens of companies and schools and not-for-profit organizations on their strategic and tactical IT support issues every week. Sometimes we're asked to do things that are not in anyone's best interest even though it may seem as if it is at the time. Being that our job is primarily to provide computer network consulting, we can't demand that our IT support services customers do what we recommend. That's where those "I told you so" moments come from.

One of our Indianapolis computer outsourcing customers is planning to move his office. We looked at the floor plans for the new space and advised him that he didn't have enough electrical outlets to support his needs in the new space. He launched into a tirade about how many building experts had reviewed these plans and found nothing wrong with them. We acknowledged that nothing was wrong, but that, given our experience with his organization (experience that none of the building experts had), he needed more outlets. He dismissed us.

Until the contractors were beginning the office space finishes and he walked thru the space. Then he realized that he didn't have enough electrical outlets. Oh, to have been able to whip out a small "I told you so" at that moment. We didn't. We had already ordered additional power strips to make up for the shortage. To avoid having to admit that we had warned him early enough to prevent this problem, he paid nearly three times as much to get the additional outlets installed.

I was told early in my time as an Indianapolis information technology consultant that my job is to advise. If I do that properly, I should not be personally committed to whether or not my customer takes the advice. I try to remember that, but it's hard when I know my customer is about to hurt himself. I've decided that as long as he isn't doing something that might cause true harm, I should say my piece and then let him make the call. To paraphrase General Petraeus, "sometimes our job is to salute and get it done."

We recently worked with a third party secure email provider in an attempt to determine how one of our Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customer's secure account had been used to send out 20,000 spam messages. The email provider, of course, blamed it all on our lax security practices. I'm not surprised by their assumption. Most small businesses do almost nothing to protect their information technology systems from malicious and dangerous software. I still find lots of computers with registered anti-virus software that has been disabled because it interfered with something they were trying to do.

In this case, however, the problem was unrelated to our comuter network services customer. Instead, it was because the email vendor didn't require password changes and a significant number of their customers were still using the original default password, unfortunately our client was one of them. This software was outside of his day-to-day email activities so he didn't want to screw with it.

People are the weakest link in IT security. No amount of hardware or software is going to prevent someone from deliberately or inadvertently exposing your computer network to outsiders. The risk gets even higher when you add the social engineering practices of some of the best hackers.

Before you let someone convince you to spend a large sum of money on additional security capabilities, consider the cost of providing 30 minutes of training on security essentials to your staff. Reminding people to stay vigilant as they go about their daily activity can do a lot more to secure your IT systems than another expensive box.

ICANN, the organization that manages Internet domains, is expected to announce next week that anyone can apply for a top level domain (TLD), meaning the letters that com after the dot in your domain. Originally, there were very few TLDs, and the biggest by far was the dot com. As the Internet expanded, more and more TLDs have been added, but always after being selected by ICANN. The new plan is to allow organizations to apply for any TLD they choose. You can have .music, or .insurance, or .automobile, or even .xyzzy. Anything goes.

Of course there are caveats, provisos, and limitations. The first being that you have to pony up $185,000 to be considered. Did I mention the cash is non-refundable if they don't like your plan?

Many IT services industry pundits believe this will change the way the Internet works for all of us. I don't believe it. From our work in Online Presence Management, we've seen that owning the dot com domain makes a big difference in terms of site traffic. Did someone sell you the .biz or .info versions of your domain? What are you doing with them?

Adding more TLDs will only make the originals more valuable because it will be an easy indication of longevity. So, go out and register as many new domains as you like. Just make sure to keep your dot com.

We've officially entered the era of the Tablet computer. Microsoft starting pushing for the tablet PC many years ago. It's sort of cosmic that it took Apple to ring in the era of the tablet. As many of you know, I can't contain the geek in me when it comes to portable devices. So it should come as no surprise to learn that I was one of the first iPad owners in Indianapolis. Nor should you be shoced to know that I took the hook and bought an iPad 2 as soon as it was available.

In the 14 months since the iPad debuted, every major hardware manufacturer, and many minor ones, has introduced their contestant for iPad killer. Each one requires a slightly different set of computer network services to be useful to its owner. So far, they've all missed the point in the same way that cell phone manufacturers constantly missed the point when the iPhone was introduced. Nonetheless, my feelings aren't attached to that little logo with the bite taken out of it. So in the interest of providing better information to my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers, I spent time with several rival devices.

I must say that, had I not experienced the iPad first, a few of these devices would have been quite impressive. However, as "me-too" devices, they lacked the simplicity of the iPad and, quite often, cost more. If you are agnostic about the manufacturer of your information technology devices, then you can save a lot of time by getting an iPad and skipping all the ranting and raving that is crowdsourcing. If you have a particular distaste for companies run by guys in mock turtleneck T-shirts, then you'll have to look at a couple of options.

My pick for Best-of-the-Rest is the Samsung Galaxy Tablet. The biggest issue with it is size. The 7 inch screen makes it too big to be a phone and too small to really be a tablet. When Samsung introduces a larger model, they will put some heat on Apple. Of course they also need to include the latest Android OS that was specifically tailored to tablets rather than phones.

If you want to "buy American" then go with the Motorola Xoom. The Xoom has a 10.1 inch screen that beats out the 9.7 inch iPad. It also includes the Honeycomb version of Android that was written for tablets. It's slightly pricier than the iPad, but you'll be able to find deals that make it comparable.

None of these devices is ready to replace your computer. In fact, most people who use tablets also carry laptops with them. If you want a device that will replace your computer, you're going to have to wait for a couple more rounds of innovation. It will happen though.

For the past several years, I've had the honor of judging nominees for the Techpoint Mira Awards. Each year, we review an amazing set of nominations. Companies that are making incredible strides in the development and application of Information Technology in central Indiana. Some of these companies are recognizable names like Exact Target, or our state's great universities: Ball State, Purdue, Rose-Hulman, IU, University of Indianapolis, and others.

This year we heard from a bar owner. Oh yes, not only did Scotty's Brewhouse get nominated. This Indiana bar won a Mira award for New Media Innovation. It's the only Mira that I can recall going to a company that is not specifically involved in technology. What did Scotty do? He turned visiting Scotty's into a game by way of Foursquare.

Now Foursquare is starting to look like the old geezer in the quest to add a game layer to our everyday life. New companies like StiQRd, Whatser, and Hipster are competing with revitalized ones like Gowalla to bring another level to the act of checking in. Right now, Indianapolis small businesses can claim their locations on many of these services and start offering special incentives to people who are nearby in order to entice them into their establishments.

Many of the organizations to which Port-to-Port Consulting provides Pertingo Computer Outsourcing services are interested in attracted more visitors to their offices. The idea of reaching out to nearby folks thru your computer network and inviting them in with small incentives is attractive.

We've been experimenting with several of these services so that we can help our Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers make wise choices when they get into this new way to market. Our next big step will happen at our 20th anniversary celebration. Don't miss it!