Most of the Wall Street earnings reports coming out these days show a decrease in revenue, but an increase in profits. How is this possible?
By cutting costs. By lowering company expenses, lower income still generates a profit.
We always try to instill cost savings measures when dealing with small businesses. Why spend $400 for Microsoft Office when you can use the free OpenOffice? Why travel on a business meeting when you can teleconference? Why pay long distance phone charges when you can use VOIP?
Several cost cutting measures using technology are outlined in a PCWorld post. They cover things like online phone services, freelancer web sites and offsite file storage and backup.
One tool they cover is ClearApps Network Inventory Advisor. It’s one of those time-saving tools you come across every so often.
Let’s say you have a small business with up to 25 computers and no IT department – how do you keep track of all those computers? For $89 (higher for more than 25 computers), ClearApps will survey all of them, showing you all of the hardware and software (including version!) on each computer, plus give you alerts, like anti-virus not installed or turned off, low hard drive space, etc.
This is a great tool for office managers or computer servicing companies.
Another interesting tool they came up with is called Egnyte. It’s an online file storage/backup service with an interesting twist. For an extra $10/month, you set up an old computer or a hard drive as a file server for your office. By adding Egnyte’s software, it continually backs up all of the files to their server.
That way you have ready access to large files locally, but they’re all backed up offsite. If you lose your Internet connection, no problem. The file server will reconnect and synchronize whenever the connection is restored.
If you just have a single computer, you can opt out of this service and just map a virtual drive to Egnyte’s server for file storage and offsite backups. It’s a little more expensive than, say, Mozy, but it’s worth investigating..
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For years we have been recommending Microsoft Office Suite to our small business clients. Within the past year we have switched over to Open Office as a free office software suite that we recommend.
The video below shows how Microsoft Office and Open Office match up…
Here is a summary of my recommendations:
For a home office – Open Office
For a small business (less than 5-10 employees) – Open Office with maybe one employee/computer having Microsoft Office.
For larger businesses that have collaboration between departments you might consider the collaboration and edit tracking features available through MS Office.
Caveats:
For heavy or interactive database use Microsoft Access is better than OpenOffice Base.
For heavy PowerPoint users Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 has a lot more bells and whistles than OpenOffice Impress.
Related Links:
OpenOffice.org
Microsoft Office
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