Dear Business Owner,
 
I’m assuming you love your team ( most of them anyway ), that hard working bunch ( some of them ) who are pleased to see you, ( pay day only ) no matter what the day may bring ( fill your own bit here ) and slave hard to make you the great success you are today.

So, all of this being true why do you insist/allow having the most backward, crazy, dangerous electronic filing system ever devised by man kind??

On a more serious note, it still amazes me the number of clients we’ve supported over the years who have numerous copies of the same files or documents or everything saved in ‘My Documents’ or other obscure location on their hard drive where files cannot be found by colleagues or are not being backed up.
 
How many hours are lost simply looking for data files on computers, making it worse when your clients are waiting for information contained in those files?  As they say; “ Time is money”.

Now, that’s bad enough from a business point of view but from my point of view ( and yes I am being a bit selfish here ) it can be a nightmare.

Poor data control really comes to a head in the event of a virus attack, pc going down or any other scenario where data can be lost.  If you ever upgrade your network or pc’s, then once again the monster rears its ugly head because I keep getting asked where ‘ so and so’ file is.

Honestly, I don’t know.  I promise you I backed up and migrated everything I could find but you didn’t tell where everything was.

The most amazing part is, the number of companies I’ve been to where the electronic filing system defies any kind of logic know to humanity, yet they have the most amazing paper based systems since Alexander The Great decided to set up a branch library in Egypt.

You could literally blind fold members of staff and they could still find all of their documents, so why aren’t they doing it in their computerised versions?

So, we’re agreed then?  It’s time to sort your files out, I know it’s a pain of a job to-do, but I promise that life will be so much easier afterwards.  The best bit, no I.T expertise is required, well the planning bit anyway.

The way I approach it is to sketch it out on paper and draw a simple diagram of how you want the structure to look like.

Once you have a plan of action, implementing it on your computer systems can range from a very simple peer to peer network all the way up to a very complex server solution, all of which we can happily install and configure for you.

An Ideal solution for a small business ( 2-7 users) would be something along the lines of:

A Buffalo Linkstation NAS server: http://www.pcworldbusiness.co.uk/buy-rent/Buffalo+LinkStation+Pro+Duo+NAS+server/P111414P?from=category&heat=txt

Other vendors are availible.
This allows you to network your pc’s and Apple Mac’s to share file on your network
An installation time of about 2 - 4 hours ( excluding the usual problem solving ) and you have a cracking little networking solution.

You’d be amazed at how much of an improvement can be made in your systems by investing a modest setup but without breaking the bank.

Well, that’s enough for now but I do hope that’s given you some food for thought.

As always, we look forward to hearing from you if you need any I.T support, advice and just a general chat.