The HST is about to be replaced with the PST/GST in British Columbia. Have you thought how this impacts your business?

Purchases of goods and services may become more expensive beginning in April if you are able to off-set what is paid in HST against what you’ve collected. Starting in April you are no longer able to claim all the taxes paid, only the GST portion.

Consider this: If you purchase $2000 in goods, you pay $240 in HST. That amount is deducted from the HST you collected, so in effect the HST is a deduction. As of April 1st, you are only able to recover or deduct the GST @ $100, the $140 paid in PST is an expense and there is no off-set available. It is spent money.

Some businesses are taking this opportunity to purchase big ticket items like computers, servers and office equipment before the change so they can claim the full tax paid, not just a portion. Have you considered this for your business? With only a few weeks left, you might want to give it some consideration.

Dear clients, friends, colleagues, and whoever else happens to be subscribed to this newsletter,
As I write this introduction to our last newsletter of 2012, it is Christmas afternoon, snowflakes are falling outside the window, and the kids are quietly playing. What a great time to reflect on another year and start planning for next year!
This year has seen a lot of changes in our business – which may, (or may not) have been evident to you.
Early this year, we made the difficult decision to close our sister business, Caylix Internet. This company was an ISP that provided filtered internet (eg – blocking porn, time wasting, gambling, violence, etc) for ADSL, Cable, dialup, and wireless users. We provided this service for 7 years. I loved the concept of helping protect families, schools, and businesses with providing a safe Internet environment, but unfortunately their was no business case due to the high support burden for all the different types of internet connections. All the administrative and technical support was done by KTI staff in our Chilliwack office.

This fall, we split the Bonded Internet division of our company into a new organization called Multapplied Networks Inc. We have been working on, and selling, the Bonded Internet technology worldwide for the last 4 years. What it does is combine multiple internet connections (any mix of DSL, Cable, Fibre, T1, etc) into a single connection that is not only faster, but also much more reliable then typical broadband connections. We sell the software license through a channel partner network, who in turn sell to businesses. Multapplied employs 4 fulltime and 4 part-time staff currently, and is still hiring. Two of the KTI software developers (Matt Fox and Nick Huber) now work for Multapplied, albeit from the same desks.

As of December 31st, 2012 we have discontinued a number of products that did not make good business sense to either our clients or us. This includes our standalone ByteVault, Anti-Virus, Monitoring, Sentry, and Live Expert services.

Our service division has changed substantially the last year. Derek Froese and Robb Breckenridge have joined us as service engineers, and Richard Clark continues as our senior engineer and Linux guru. As Service Manager, Paul Sky Switzer has implemented a ton of new processes such as triage, dispatch, quality management, documentation, streamlined billing, and more. Luke Duguid is our senior software engineer, working primarily on a custom electrical engineering application for a local manufacturing company but also handling regular Windows software development for other clients both in Canada and the UK.

On the operations side, Ruth Weller has joined us as fulltime Controller and Office Admin. As Business Development Manager, Cora Price is meeting with many local businesses to educate them on better ways of managing technology and the results we are delivering for other clients.

Organizationally, we have matured with improved systems and processes, professional development, regular staff meetings and think tanks, and quarterly planning. We have an accountability board and work with several business coaches. A ton of changes and adjustments were required for everyone, myself included!

All of the above changes have allowed us to hyper focus on our business technology support package called Technology Loving Care (TLC). Manufacturing, Construction, and First Nations organizations are already enjoying this fixed-free service plan. With TLC, clients with 5 or more computers can call us anytime without extra bills, worry free backups, predictable 5 year budgets and strategic plans, regular meetings, and a lot more. For some clients, we also work together with their in-house IT professionals.
I have made some changes in our newsletter format to simplify it. The entire goal of the newsletter is to keep you informed of activities at KTI, and especially provide you with valuable Technology content that you can use in your business free of charge. At the moment, almost all of the blog content is written by writers that we pay. Over the coming months we will be introducing our own blog posts that will be more engaging and relevant to you. I want you to look forward to receiving the next newsletter and not just delete it… I am open to receiving topics and ideas – just drop me a line at wim@kerkhofftech.ca! Guest blog appearances are also welcome!
For today’s newsletter, here is a quick intro to each of the major topics as to why I think they will be of interest to you. (You can find a many more similar articles at www.kerkhofftech.ca/blog):

• Password Management – Everyone complains about the zillions of passwords they need nowadays. Every website has its own password, your computer can have multiple etc. What should you and are you going to do to add some order to the chaos? Leaked or hacked passwords can not only be just inconvenience or embarrassing, but also have major financial and legal risks.
•  Policies – in another word, you need rules for your business. As part of TLC, we provide a large number of technology related policies to your business.
•  Solid State Drives (SSD) – these new generation of hard drives are slightly more expensive then the traditional “SATA” drives – however they provide a HUGE performance boost to computers and servers. I use them in my own home & work computers and would never go back.
•  Windows 8 – my recommendation to all businesses is to AVOID Windows 8 for now. There are no real benefits. The major item to be aware of is a drastically redesigned interface intended for tablet users who use touch rather then a mouse. The corporate world is holding back on any upgrades for office environments.
• Referral program – we provide a $500 appreciation gift to anyone who refers an organization to us who they feel would benefit from our TLC package.

On a more personal note, my wife Rudi and I are looking forward to the birth of our 4th child at the end of February, and probably another pilgrimage in the spring to the Netherlands to visit her family and our friends there.

To all clients, vendors, staff, coaches, business friends, and other business acquaintances – a huge thank you for how you have positively impacted our business and myself this year! I wish you a fantastic and healthy 2013! Keep an eye on your quarterly and yearly personal and work goals and work hard for them.

Wim
Wim Kerkhoff | President & Systems Architect
www.kerkhofftech.ca/

Is your Technology Lovingly Cared For?
Ask me about $500 CASH in your Jeans!

Welcome to the biggest technology shift in the last ten years!

Whether you like it or not, Microsoft is forcing some major changes on the world of business. Server 2012 versions are being released right now. Soon Windows 8 will be out. SBS 2011 products will be phased out next year. The new Server 2012 Essentials will probably be the best thing for businesses in a long time.

In addition to that, the cloud is coming on strong. Not just Office 365, but the real cloud. Amazon, Google, and smaller companies such as Rackspace.

1.) Small Business Service is being phased out by Microsoft. NOW is the time to start planning. Will you move to the cloud for Exchange services in the future, or buy the last SBS server you’ll ever own? Let’s meet and start planning.

2.) Windows 8 is out (well, in October). Will you be sticking with Windows 7 for a while? If so, you need to plan your buying strategy. Between now and New Years, we expect some great prices on machines that were pre-built with Windows 7. If you buy Open Licenses, you will be able to install Windows 7 now and Windows 8 when you’re ready – with no additional costs for the O.S. Let’s meet and start planning.

3.) Your server is old. So even if you want to keep it, we should look at upgrading the memory, and replacing hard drives before they start failing. You have to decide whether you’ll be replacing that server with another server or cloud services. But in the meantime, you need to keep the current system UP so your company won’t be DOWN. Can we meet and start planning?

4.) Your Internet is old. First, you might be paying a lot for a small amount of bandwidth. Let’s look at your options. Second, even if you have a fast (20MB+) Internet connection, chances are very good that your routers, firewalls, wireless access points, and switches are NOT able to use all the bandwidth you’re paying for. Let’s test this and see. New chipsets are much faster. Third, as you prepare for cloud services, you should have redundant Internet connections. There are alternatives in every price range. Let’s meet and talk about these things.

5.) I’m sure you’ve heard about Office 365 and Office 2012. It’s not right for most businesses, but it might be right for yours. Just to address your curiosity, let us come by and give you a demonstration. Then we can talk about the best office products for your business.

6.) Backups are easier and more affordable than ever. As storage becomes cheaper, we’re seeing clients using more and more. Your existing backup may not be able to give you a complete backup each day before work starts the next day. In order to safeguard your system and minimize the impact on your employees, you need to plan for the backup you’ll need next year. That might involve a backup to the Cloud, or to an onsite device that copies the data to the cloud. We have more options than ever. Let’s meet to talk about your options.

7.) Change happens. This is a period of whirlwind change. You can put off change only so long and then it affects your business. The server is now the slowest machine in the office. Older equipment and operating systems are more expensive to maintain. Having multiple operating systems and office products makes your employees less productive. Let’s meet and build a plan for migrating to the future.

8.) Consider our TLC program. We have a set monthly fee program of services that may be perfect for your business. It includes budgets, strategic planning, unlimited remote support, many of the items mentioned above and a choice of on-site levels of support. It protects your business, provides the highest level of support to keep all your technology tools running smoothly. We help you strategize for the future, we notify you of changes you need to be aware of and plan for those changes. Can we meet and discuss this option.

Our door is open to you – call us at 604-824-2770 and let us help you answer the questions you need to be asking to make these transitions smooth and cost effective.

“We now know that ICT has a very real impact on small business productivity, innovation and competitiveness. In fact, much of the productivity problem in Canada can be attributed to insufficient investments in technology,” explained Jean-René Halde, BDC President and Chief Executive Officer. “BDC is not claiming that it can solve this problem alone, but we believe that with our support a large number of entrepreneurs can get funds and consulting services to help them better integrate ICT more efficiently in their business model.”

For more information…

Many of our staff are on vacation and we are operating with a skeleton crew. However yesterday at at our weekly staff meeting, we still had an amazing discussion around productivity. Everyone answered the following three questions:

1. What does productivity mean to you?
2. What makes you feel more productive?
3. What makes you feel less productive?

There were lots of different answers since everyone has different roles, at the same time we found a few commonalities, chiefly, we all use computers regardless of our role.

After lunch, we all committed to doing one thing in the coming weeks to improve our productivity. Isn’t it great to go home and feel like we accomplished what we set out to do?

Here are the top 11 ideas we came up with to improve anyone’s productivity. This is strictly based from our discussion and not from searching Google – I am sure you can add tons of your own strategies. We recommend that you discuss this list with your own colleagues as well.

1. Make sure your tasks align towards your long term goals. Run in the direction of your goals and don’t allow yourself to get distracted or change direction!
2. Create more small tasks instead of fewer large tasks. It feels great to cross off a couple things every day from your task list!
3. Spend time learning your tools and technology – you will feel so much better about your productivity.
4. Before starting a project, make sure to understand what areas you may need to research first. Make the learning or research a separate task that you can cross off your list.
5. Work on one thing at a time!
6. Avoid switching between tasks at all costs. If you do need to switch tasks, then first leave a note for yourself so that you can quickly resume from where you are.
7. Creating task lists is liberating. Identifying all the tasks of a job can instantly make you feel productive and you haven’t even started yet!
8. Get enough sleep!
9. If your job duties require you to deal with interruptions from clients and focused project work, then dedicate times of the day for each if possible. Collaborate with colleagues to buffer each other from interruptions so that everyone has at least some quiet focused time.
10. Keep the number of programs open on your computer to a minimum! Close unnecessary browser windows and documents. Reduce visual clutter as much as possible.
11. For people in a sales role, having an understanding of productivity is crucial so that we can effectively capture a prospect’s attention and not be hung up on. Understand the person’s goals and act on those!

Personally, I have stopped using my inbox as my task management system – it’s a terrible boss. What are you using to manage your daily tasks?

Best Regards,

Wim Kerkhoff
Kerkhoff Technologies

We have a confession to make…..

We don’t like admitting when we are stumped, but sometimes it happens.  We were tossing around the idea of how our customers thought about, and experienced, cloud services. Most staff members seemed to have a different opinion, so we decided to ask our customers (you) directly.

Did you receive an email from us asking questions about cloud computing? We wanted to find out what is important to you and how we, as a technology partner, could support you in understanding and  implementing the cloud environment.

We received a pleasant surprise by the results of that email – a 33% response rate!  Tells us cloud computing is something of interest to our customers.  We received tons of great feedback and want to share what we learned with you:

• Down time & disaster recovery is the # 1 problem that you felt could be solved with cloud computing – most of the respondents rated it a 4 or 5.
• Document collaboration is the 2^nd problem most businesses thought cloud services could help with
• A few people don’t understand what “the cloud” is and even if they need to be concerned or interested in it. Would you be interested in a lunch & learn about this topic so you can get some additional information to make this decision?
• You felt the biggest benefit was Portability (rated 4 & 5) and then Standardization (rated 4)
• Many felt a certain amount of vulnerability thinking that if the “cloud” went down, you would have a difficult time conducting your business.

Some people wanted to know how their business could utilize this “new technology”, without realizing that they’ve been using it for years –off-site back-ups and emails are the most common cloud services.

Common questions about Cloud Services:

What is the cloud anyway?
The cloud is a storage area available on the internet. The cloud can be used for data storage, program execution, collaboration of information and easy access anywhere to your data and programs.

Is the cloud secure?
Yes, security has increased with time and most cloud services are more secure than any other form of online service.

What happens when the internet goes down?
You are dependent on the internet for accessing your cloud location but often if the internet is down it is area specific. Go to another area and you will often find you’ve got connectivity again. This gives you the ability to pull your data from anywhere you are.

Do we risk losing our data?
Back-ups are commonly done frequently for any cloud service, but it is always wise to keep a copy of your most important information available locally.
Most companies move to the cloud to streamline their business operations by:

• Providing access to documents no matter where they are or what tool they are using (phone, netbook, notebook or ipad or someone else’s computer
• No expensive servers to purchase, maintain, keep cool or look after (keeps your overhead down)
• Software licensing is no longer an issue. The cloud provider supplies it. (No worries about Microsoft breathing down your neck.)
• Employees can do their work from the office, home, on vacation (in case of an emergency or forgotten item), wherever they have internet access.
• The cloud allows for synchronization between all your devices – you no longer have to look at or handle the same item more than once. Synchronization recognizes when you’ve looked at, processed or responded to an item, no matter what device you use.

Is cloud services expensive?
Cloud computing can reduce operating costs because the business is not incurring high upfront costs for purchasing expensive servers, software, space for storage, etc. Businesses are also able to pay for only what they use (scalable) for data storage and backups.

In fact, expenses can be reduced through less paperwork and lower transaction costs. The need for IT staff is greatly reduced as well.

Business owners must do their homework before making a decision to move to the cloud. Weigh the pros and cons for your business. If you want expert advice or would like to explore this topic more, call on Kerkhoff Technologies to answer your questions: 604-824-2770 or email sales@kerkhofftech.ca.

Did you know that we have a ticket portal for checking up on KTI services? If you said no, you aren’t alone. Through feedback with our clients we discovered that few even knew we had a portal and those that did found it hard to find and harder to use.

Today, we are proud to announce our new, revamped ticket portal with an easy to remember location: www.kerkhofftech.ca/tickets. We have added a bunch of new features and cleaned up old ones to make it easier than ever to manage the support that we provide:

• From the main page you are able to access currently open tickets, check on their status, even upload files and comments to the engineer! We have also added the ability to escalate a ticket to management if you have concerns or praise for how your service was handled.
• On the top right corner of any page is a button to access ticket creation. Currently we are able to receive service requests from the portal, but in future we expect to expand to handle non-service related inquiries as well. If your service request is not urgent, it is even possible to put in a requested date (Please understand we will do our best to meet that date, but may need to change it depending on our normal queue priorities).
• Also from the main page and by accessing the “Knowledge Base” tab at the top of the screen it is possible to review previous service tickets! For all the times there was that one thing you remember we did last year, but can’t quite remember what it was, it’s now searchable by key words in the title or notes of the record.
• For administrators of an account, we have also provided access to view current agreements and their balance (for those not on unlimited monthly or yearly service plans) as well as historical invoices. Please note that currently we are limited administrator access to only one user per account for your security.
• Finally, we have also added access to a system health overview for clients of our Sentry and Technology Loving Care services. At a moment’s notice you have access to the overall health of your computers, servers, and network including hard drive and memory use, virus statistics (For users with integrated anti-virus), Microsoft Windows patch health, and even backup status once our ByteVault Version 2.0 rolls out later this year.

We are very excited to share our new portal with you and hope that you will find it easy to use and connect with. If you have any questions, or would just like to catch up please feel free to email or call me!

Cheers,

Paul Sky Switzer
Service Manager
support@kerkhofftech.ca
604-824-2770

Having the right kind of email system in place can do wonders for increasing productivity, especially for people on the go. It’s important to note the distinctions and feature differences of the email systems available to you, so you can be sure that what you’re using is the most efficient and cost-effective solution.

Whether you work from an office or are productive while on the go, email most likely plays a big factor in the way you go about your business. Unbeknownst to many, some types of email systems have certain limitations that by extension can also limit the level of productivity of your business, and especially for people in the organization who must also work while out in the field.

One major issue for many people is synchronicity. Many people need their emails to be accessible on their mobile phones, PDAs, or other mobile devices, and they need them to be properly synchronized with their desktop workstations. The need to constantly update conversations and email threads from mobile devices to desktops with certain types of email can prove to be tedious and unproductive– and some email system types don’t include this ability at all.

Depending on the way you use your email, especially when on the go, having full access and full control of your account can define how productive you and others in your organization can be. Besides providing a much better degree of synchronization and integration with mobile devices, certain types of email systems also have features for sharing and collaboration features that allow you to set schedules and share files from your mailbox, as well as central storage for emails that allows you to access your account seamlessly with any mobile device, regardless of where you are located.

Of course, having a full-featured email system might not be best for everyone. The key is to know whether adapting a more bare-bones system is cost-effective for your business (especially in the long run). Sometimes the top of the line may be needed, and sometimes all you need is a bit of tweaking on your less fully featured system. Not sure which is best? Call us and we’ll be glad to sit down with you and assess what kind of email system is best suited for you and your business.

The proliferation of websites and social media tools is making the job of monitoring what’s being said about you online increasingly difficult to do. But you need to somehow make sense of the sea of information available in these online tools, because depending on what’s being said—it can have either a helpful or a damaging effect on your reputation or your business. Here are some tools to help you.

Besides your own eyes and ears, there are plenty of tools—for free or for a price—available to help you monitor your presence online. The simplest of these is your familiar search engines such as Google or Bing. By simply searching online, you can find where your name or your company’s name appears in various websites. With Google in particular, you can set up “alerts” which will email you when a specific word or term appears in their website index.

What words or terms should you use? Start with your name, or your company name, then try the name of your products and/or services, and maybe even the names of your employees, directors, and other stakeholders. It might also be helpful to search for the competition as well. As results come in you can refine your search by expanding or narrowing the scope of terms you would like to search or be alerted on. If you want to be able to search across all different search engines and not just one or two, you can use Monitor This.

Next you can use specialized website or social media monitoring tools to search only specific sites or services as opposed to the entire Internet. One example is Greplin, which allows you to search all of your accounts or accounts that you own. This is very helpful to be able to execute highly filtered searches on specific information in your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn accounts, or your blog. Another option is Rollyo, which allows you to set up your own specialized search engines that cull content from public or open websites of your choosing.

Other more generalized tools include RSS feed readers—which allow you to consume news or information feeds from news sites or blogs. Examples include Newsgator.com, Bloglines.com, Google Reader or Pluck.com. Other generalized tools include those that monitor specific newsgroups or message boards like BoardReader.com, ForumFind.com, Big-Boards.com, BoardTracker.com, iVillage, Yahoo Message Boards, and MSN Money. Still others track changes to content of specific sites (Copernic Tracker, Website Watcher and WatchThatPage.com), as well as their domain information (DomainTools.com and BetterWhois.com).

The really interesting new services actually give you an explicit idea of the status of your reputation—especially if you are a relatively well known name or your business has an established brand. In this category are sites like Amplicate, which monitors general feelings or impressions about brands, businesses, or services; Klout, which tries to measure the influence of individuals based on their social interactions; and SendLove.to, which focuses on celebrities and media personalities.

There are literally dozens more tools you can use to monitor and manage your reputation online. To find out more, a great resource is here at the Duct Tape Marketing blog. If you have any additional suggestions, feel free to let us know!

Interested in setting up your company’s email in the cloud? Here are two options to consider—one from Microsoft, the other from Google. See how they compare.

Google Apps
Google Apps is a service from Google that started in 2006, with the introduction of Gmail—a hosted email service, and which later incorporated other apps such as Google Calendar, Groups, Talk, Docs and Sites. Google Apps allow customers an independently customizable version of these Google products under their own domain name. The entry level option is free, but the package offered for Businesses is a paid service with an annual fee per user and additional storage space.

1. Storage. Gmail, Google Apps’ email service starts with a sizable 7GB of free storage. Business users get 25GB. Bear in mind however that this storage space is shared with any data you have in other Google properties such as Picasa Web Album and Google Docs. Extra space can be bought however starting with USD $5 per year for an extra 20GB of storage. E-mail attachment sizes are limited to 25MB.
2. Calendaring and Task Management. Gmail can be integrated with the overall excellent Google Calendar application. Google Calendar allows you to easily share personal calendars with colleagues, or create shared calendars used by groups of people (such as a calendar to track meeting room reservations, marketing events and others). Google Calendar also offers a built-in, but somewhat underpowered task management tool. Tasks can readily be added with due dates, but not readily shared or cannot be nested or linked with other tasks.
3. Spam filtering, security and reliability. Gmail’s spam filtering features a community-driven system. Email tagged as spam by users help identifies similar messages as Spam for all other Gmail users. Generally the system works well, although some have complained that it can get over aggressive in its filters. In terms of security and reliability—Gmail has been criticized in the past with showing ads in its free Gmail service that display based on key words in the user’s messages—potentially violating their privacy. Its paid service offers however the option of disable these ads. Reliability is generally good with very few, but widely publicized disruptions in service.
4. Usability. Gmail offers a host of unique usability enhancements that make it different from most other mail services. For one for a web app it loads really fast, as Google has been known to studiously optimize web page loading performance for their products. Another is that it offers a threaded view of messages by default. It also uses a starring/labeling system to tag and segregate messages instead of using folders. Another interesting enhancement done recently is the ability to sort messages by “importance” where it learns based on your usage over time what email messages it thinks you think are important.
5. Mobile access. Gmail offers a version optimized for mobile devices, as well as support for a variety of devices for their native mail applications such as iOS and Android.

Overall Gmail is a solid mature choice if you are thinking of moving email to the cloud and are not afraid of being on the bleeding edge of cloud services and technology.

Microsoft Office 365
Microsoft Office 365, like Google Apps, offers a host of applications such as online versions of productivity tools which we all already know and use such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Most however work best when they are used in conjunction with your desktop-installed Office applications. Focusing on email, Office 365 offers a Hosted Exchange service, which transforms the mature, business-proven on-premise application to an on-demand service. Compared to Google Apps, it is quite new—being introduced only last June this year, although its suite of products in an alternate form has been around for much earlier.

1. Storage. Microsoft’s Hosted Exchange email service gives users 25GB of storage. Attachment file sizes are limited to 35MB. Additional storage can be purchased for $2.5 per GB per user per month.
2. Calendaring and Task Management. Exchange integrates a mature feature set for personal productivity including calendaring, resource management, and task management. As an example tasks can be grouped, color coded and easily sorted. Emails can be converted as tasks and so on.
3. Spam filtering, security and reliability. This is an area where perhaps Microsoft easily outshines Google with Exchange’s roots as an enterprise-class application. It offers spam protection, antivirus and others via Microsoft’s Forefore Online Protection for Exchange technology. It offers other features such as more full features user management, identity access management, mail archiving, etc. If you are in a highly regulated industry like financial services or healthcare these features may be essential for your business.
4. Usability. While the web apps of Office 365 is not as fast loading or as slick as Google, it does offer familiarity. Modeled after their desktop brethren, or directly integrating with them—they offer a smoother migration experience for users specially if they have been weaned on Outlook.
5. Mobile access. Like Gmail Microsoft made sure to support a variety of devices on launch, as well as integration with a variety of devices—specially enterprise stalwarts like Blackberry mobile phones.

Overall Office 365 is a solid choice if you are thinking of moving email to the cloud but may be hesitant with changing the apps your users already know and use. Also if you are a business with strict policies related to security and compliance—this service may be something your auditors and IT people may be more comfortable with.

Interested in learning more? Can’t decide which to try? Let us know and find out how we can help get you the right balance between your existing IT systems and infrastructure and the cloud.