Technology Reflections is a newsletter sponsored and prepared by Mickler & Associates, Inc. of Vancouver, Washington.  The newsletter addresses the technology concerns of small business in every day lingo and reflects on trends, issues, and tips to help your company gain competitive advantage from tech spend. Please feel free to distribute to colleagues and partners.

Doing IT Differently

Okay.

Pretend for a moment that you're a small business with ten employees.

In order to have integrated calendaring, appointments, email, tasks, and contacts, you've gone out and purchased a Microsoft Small Business Server and manage it in your office. There are files and other forms of intellectual property on this server, too, and you've setup a backup regimen.

Along the way you've had to pay for additional software licenses, pay for initial setup and administration, and pay for its ongoing maintenance. You've had to pay for Microsoft Office on every PC to interact with it. And to remotely access resources on this server, you must use Microsoft-based services like Remote Web Workplace or Outlook Web Access to have access to your information. You've had to expose your network to the outside world to allow for this, taking on an additional security risk.

There was cost wrapped in the initial asset purchase, cost in software licenses for the server and client workstations, cost in their configuration and security, cost in their support, cost in their connectivity, and cost found in their long-term maintenance.

Now..

Pretend for a moment that you allowed Google to handle all of your company's email, calendaring, tasks, contacts, appointments, files, videos, voicemail, and images. Calendars can be shared, appointments and notices set, email managed to contacts and distribution lists, and visual voicemail can be dropped into your inbox - you can listen to it online or read it. You can use it anywhere, on any kind of personal computer or mobile device, and with any software. This product is called Google Apps.

Google maintains your materials privately.  Unauthorized parties on the Internet can't see your data. Google hosts your email domain and routes your email instead of you doing it yourself. In the process, the cost of screening out bad mail and scanning for viruses is shifted to Google. The cost of maintenance, backup and disaster recovery, support, and system administration with your Small Business Server is eliminated by also shifting this expense to Google. And setting up and managing users is something you can do directly using Google's easy-to-use administration features - lowering the cost of administration through self-service.

You and your team can access all of your data anywhere there's an Internet connection at no risk to your company's assets or intellectual property. Anywhere Google is, you can access your data - including at home, when you're traveling, or at your remote offices. Plus, you can interface with this information using services, software, and devices that naturally talk to Google services.

Finally, when you're ready to share information with co-workers, partners, or customers, it's easy to use Google's sharing features to securely share your content with authorized parties via the web.

Imagine: no server. Google is the server: professionally managed, maintained, and administered with built-in safeguards for spyware, malware, viruses, and spam that are a part of the service. You could literally turn off your server.

Imagine: total open access everywhere. You have access to your information 24x7x365 in the Cloud. Regardless of product or platform, any device or system that can access Google - Microsoft Office, PC's, Mac's, Linux, Open Office, Thunderbird - can use this solution.

Imagine: subscription-based expenses. Instead of paying for software licenses or upgrades to match your growth you can contract or extend the expense to meet your variable business requirements.

Imagine: reduced risk through professional management. Instead of handling data backups and redundancy, or exposing your network to greater potential risk, Google provides that as part of the service.

As compared to the traditional route of setting up and maintaining Small Business Servers, there is a new game in town and a new way to do IT.  This is an example of Cloud Computing, and - strategically - consider for a minute how Cloud Computing could help your company achieve its goals. And alternatively, consider - strategically - how Cloud Computing may be helping your competitors.

Russell P. Mickler, CISSP
Principal Consultant, Mickler & Associates, Inc.
360.601.0818 | rmickler@micklerandassociates.com

10 Tips for Conserving Laptop Battery Life

I'm asked this one a lot.

1. Brightness Control. Dim the brightness of the display. The display, along with the CD ROM and WiFi adapter, are the most power-draining devices on your laptop. The more you can do to keep brightness down, the better it is for battery longevity.

2. Detach Peripherals. Devices connected to the laptop draw off battery power. Disconnect as many devices as possible, and only use devices when you have to - disconnect them after their use.

3. Watch Demand. Watching a two-hour movie on a laptop is high-demand; intense graphics of any kind push processor needs, graphic displays, and input/output reads (from the hard disk or CD ROM). This creates more draw from the battery. Plug the unit in to an outlet if your demand needs are high.

4. Sleep (Hibernate). Set the system to hibernate and not suspend. Suspend keeps portions of the system online and drawing from the battery for a faster response from down-time. Instead, tell the system to hibernate which caches all of memory to the hard disk and shuts the system off. This will prevent excess draw against the battery.

5. Avoid Extremes. Extreme cold and heat will affect the chemistry of the batteries and make them less efficient. Try to keep your laptop in dry conditions, somewhere between 68 and 88 degrees.

6. Get a Second Battery. Why not? They're relatively inexpensive and could double your battery life, as well as allow you to load-balance between multiple batteries.

7. Defragment Often. Frequent defragging optimizes drive i/o and reduces the amount of time that it takes to access the hard disk. This minimizes the draw on the battery and optimizes performance.

8. Minimize. We wouldn't expect to see all of the applications on a desktop machine running on a laptop. This is because the laptop has to conserve more power, and shouldn't be running silly little weather applets (for example). Non-essential services and applications should be shut off or uninstalled while using the laptop unplugged.

9. Turn off auto-save features. Word and Excel like to do auto-saves on documents every 3 minutes which creates demand for the hard drive and consumes battery power. If you were to disable this feature in the Office suite, it would put less demand on the life of your battery.

10. Turn Off the WiFi. Your wireless adapter is a radio that constantly transmitting. That takes a lot of juice! You can power the adapter off by using a button usually found on the side or front of your laptop; it shuts down the adapter when not in use. It's a good security precaution, but it's also a great idea for conserving the battery.

And a bonus-tip: don't leave your battery/laptop plugged in indefinitely. Lithium-ion batteries can "burn" if they're always plugged in which damages the battery and prevents it from holding a charge. If you've ever noticed that, over time, your laptop's battery life is progressively smaller, it's usually due to the batteries "burning" in this fashion. Instead, allow the unit to recharge (perhaps 2-3 hours) then unplug the unit from the wall outlet.

Russell P. Mickler, CISSP
Principal Consultant, Mickler & Associates, Inc.
360.601.0818 | rmickler@micklerandassociates.com