Raw 03 - November 2008 - (Page 56)

RAW CENTAUR SYSTEMS GetSupported IT Pitfalls to avoid when stating a new business Being in charge of a small business gives me the opportunity to work with organisations of varying shapes and sizes that all have one thing in common: they need their computers to work. As much as we sometimes wish it weren’t the case, today’s businesses need computers and the internet to do a large chunk of work. When these have gone, the inevitable panic ensures. Have someone ready One of the things that you should be prepared for is that things do go wrong. And usually at the time that you need it the least. Having somebody ready to help you in these times of crises goes a long way to helping at these critical moments. Having a service such as instant remote support gives you that peace of mind. For example, a client recently phoned me up, having accidentally deleted a large chunk of their work. With their computer turned on, I could connect to their desktop over the internet, talk to them over the phone, and managed to recover the missing work without leaving my office. They were happy that their work was recovered so quickly, and I was happy I didn’t have to travel at a peak time. Backup, backup, backup Of course, maybe they would have been more prepared if they had backup up their work in the first place. If you keep files that are remotely important to you, back them up! If you have one or two computers with a CD or DVD writer, you can just drag your files onto the CD drive from your My Documents folder occasionally and create a disc. If your hard drive fails, and you desperately need those invoices, letters or accounts – the bill to retrieve the data could spiral to hundreds or pounds! Good Relationships Save Money In my experience, I’ve found that going to my clients’ sites and meeting them makes a huge difference to just being at the end of the phone. Usually I don’t know anything about my clients’ business – but I can see how their work could be improved. “Every time you come and see us, you make my work slightly easier,” I was told last week. I know nothing about pharmaceutical recruitment (I can barely spell it), but thanks to that face-toface service, I could immediately see how he could use the computers his to work more efficiently and save huge amount of time each day. Save Money Again It never hurts to look on the internet for free software instead of shelling out for expensive software. Have you tried OpenOffice (www. openoffice.org) instead of MS Office? PDFCreator (www.pdfforge.org) to create PDFs, or CDBurnerXP (www.cdburnerxp.se) to create CDs and DVDs ? Make IT Easy Of course, if you want to know any more about any of this article, or need to discuss your own support needs, then drop us a line at info@centaur.it or visit us at www.centaur.it      56 millionimpossible.com http://www.openoffice.org http://www.openoffice.org http://www.pdfforge.org http://www.cdburnerxp.se http://www.centaur.it http://www.centaur.it http://www.millionimpossible.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Raw 03 - November 2008

Raw 03 - November 2008 Contents Bradley Chapman Rachael Elnaugh Linda Klassen-Brown Heidi Weir Mark Asquith Emma Thompson Chris Wright

Raw 03 - November 2008

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