The tickle in the throat. The scratch in the chest. The leak in the nose. Far from down and out, you’re functioning just fine, thankyouverymuch. Still, there’s trouble around your edges and every reason to believe you could be performing at levels much closer to the top of your game.

But wait. Before congratulating yourself on the wisdom that delivered tickly, scratchy, leaky you to the doctor’s office in pursuit of a clean bill, consider that other parts of your life could benefit from similarly preventative attention.

An information technology health check is common sense, write large, 72-point type, shout it from the rooftops and nothing less. Technology, after all, is a torpedo, tugging progress along by the nosehairs. For a company to imagine it can remain still in this rushing current, without benefit of the occasional Band-Aid, upgrade or plans best laid, is pure folly.

At 360 Visibility, our proven IT Health Check provides clients with a comprehensive review of their IT infrastructure status. Complete with diagnosis, we offer an all-in prescription for improvement. Among other things, our detailed report will identify both areas of present-day, drag-you-down incompetence and of big, hairy potential risk. We’ll benchmark your firm against industry best practices and offer some guidance on bridging the divide.

We’ll tell you if your existing infrastructure can be better aligned with your existing business strategy. We’ll scope out your IT inefficiencies. We’ll poke around your disaster recovery and business continuity provisions. We’ll take a listen to your IT policies and procedures.

Your cabling, switching, wireless networks, phone system, routing and firewalls will all be subject to a technician’s gentle exploration. We’ll call up your legacy phone system to see if it’s up to snuff.

And we’ll give you a brutal glimpse of the scene that awaits a company that makes no move to improve.

More than that, qualified 360 Visibility technicians will set you up with a exhaustive report that includes working paper checklists on those specific categories we’ve identified as worth watching, and solid written counsel to help you prioritize next steps within an implementation timeline.

Your IT Infrastructure is a critical factor in the success of your business. It provides the construct for your employees to do their jobs. It facilitates daily operations and expedites plans for growth. Thanks to it, security, communication and access to information are reasonable expectations for a day at the office.

If the information technology bones inside a business are unwell, or even in peril of minor fracture, the company as a whole will suffer. And if the place isn’t operating at maximum capacity, when a certified IT professional with a highly refined trouble-seeking stethoscope is at such close hand, well, that’s just a shame.

And that doesn’t feel good at all.

SharePoint is a browser-based collaboration and document-management platform from Microsoft. Effectively a content-management system, SharePoint allows groups to set up a centralized, password-protected space for document sharing. Here, documents can be stored, downloaded and edited, and then uploaded for continued sharing. SharePoint can also host specialized applications, such as wikis and blogs, from within a browser.

The logic behind the concept is that an organization’s effectiveness can by streamlined by having someone else oversee the maintenance of a server, and the management of the data on it. Corporate clients have outsiders host applications on a SharePoint platform such that developers can focus on the application and not have to worry about such minutiae as access, permissions and coordinating look-and-feel with other applications.

A feature-rich document storage site and retrieval system, SharePoint boasts a cache of tools that includes document storage, tasks, calendars, announcements and contacts—data-dense material that SharePoint frees from a multitude of desktop folders on company servers. Users can also sync up their MS Outlook to work with SharePoint to share calendars and appointments.

SharePoint works in units called sites, which are really just collections of tools. A single business may have many sites and sub-sites, each with SharePoint’s drill-down capability.

Users can access SharePoint from anywhere: through their web browser, Outlook or compatible Microsoft Office applications like Word 2007 and Excel 2007. And you can further customize your SharePoint site with Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007 and Visual Studio 2005 access.

It is a brilliant, easy and seamless integrate into your corporate culture. Good-bye Windows Explore with in nested directories and unsearchable documents.

360 Visibility: Points worth Sharing

At 360 Visibility, our hosted SharePoint service has been built with component-level redundancy, and is housed in one of the most sophisticated data centres on the market. Clients can develop business-line applications delivered through a secure portal to help increase their efficiencies.

With the click of a button they can set up new accounts, reset passwords and manage storage. The whole point of hosted SharePoint, after all, is to relieve non-technically minded administrators of the burden of IT expertise. And users also gain access to 360’s considerable resources to create their own rocking applications featuring cool and uber-efficient functionality like automated processes and event-driven e-mail alerts.

And of course the choice to sign on with 360’s hosted SharePoint services means access to an expertly managed—and individually customized—Microsoft Windows environment without having to invest in the building and maintenance of a comparably outfitted in-house system. You pay only for the service you need and sidestep handily the initial outlay of installation, to say nothing of the ongoing cost of support.

Best of all, SharePoint users can rest assured knowing their SharePoint site—managed capably by Microsoft Gold Certified staff—is always available to them through redundancy and 24×7 monitoring.

(Continued from Part I)

There is something about a new year that gets a person in a predictive frame of mind. A psychic to the stars I am not. But as a fairly successful company we have earned the right to claim some vision, I would think.

And so, without further ado, perched as we are on the brink of yet another decade, bereft of political stimulation thanks to prorogued news, weary of the effort required to stay abreast of the late-night talk-show scramble, I present my collection of predictions for the year ahead (complete with context from years past).

First off, take note. The Apple iPhone is going to take over the world. Or at least it’s poised to and would need to be victim to some serious natural disaster to tumble from its podium.

Are you listening, BlackBerry Jim and BlackBerry Mike? I’d respectfully suggest you plan for a massive comeback in 2010. FYI: The BlackBerry Storm was a very poor copy of the iPhone.  I still own a Blackberry, because typing 22 words per minute is not possible on the iPhone. Hint hint…

Still on the BlackBerry, it’s instructive, historically speaking, to reflect on the state of its earliest incarnation. Not pretty, and it was a single device, way back in its youth, for e-mailing alone—nothing else. Progress has been swift and effective here. I’d recommend some more.

And while we’re on about mobile technology and the distance it’s come, let’s hark back to the birth of mobile phones. I remember some of the very first: little more than enormous battery-carrying cases. And of course the Cantel 22lb Hammer!

Fast forward to today, when a mobile phone is less about facilitating conversation between two parties than it is about being the centre of the party. The latest cellphone is a phone, yes. But you almost sense that’s more a nod to conventional expectation than anything.

After all, this thing is also a camera, GPS, Bluetooth, MP3 player, time scheduler, Internet browser, alarm giver, video taker, note recorder and electronic mailer—that can place telephone calls as required. It has, in short, taken control of our lives.  And yet you still can’t turn the damn thing on when you’re in the air.

Next, let’s put the whole Dragon’s Den – Shark Tank debate to rest. Dragons are legendary creatures whose storied histories include no shortage of derring-do. Sharks? Well, they’re cold-blooded killers who always seem to be on the hunt for a decent meal. Hence, Dragons are cooler then Sharks. And the Canadians seem much more willing to close a deal than their American counterparts. Perhaps the spinoff show should have been called Chicken Tank. And why are Kevin O’Leary and Robert Herjavec featured on Shark’s Tank? They are Canadians! Where’s the Donald?

And let us dispatch with this shopping bag bylaw already. What a complete joke, especially the idea of charging a nickel for the things. This bit of government-implemented nonsense is not, in fact, greening the Earth, as we’ve been led to believe. Remember the ’80s? Retailers charged us for bags back then, too.

And, p.s.: It costs less than $.001 to make an enviro-unfriendly plastic bag. You do the math. Someone should invent a truly “green” plastic bag that will disintegrate when mixed with water. That would be some environmentally friendly thinking.

And finally, a bit of math to close out our forward view. Homeopathic plus modern medicine equals naturopathic. Excellent. Question: Why haven’t more medical doctors calculated this equation? Answer: Big-Pharma.

On to 2010.

I’m not looking to ride the ink trails of Charles Dickens here, but it’s awfully hard to resist when he laid down so apt an all-purpose summary of a year. Because it is always the best of times—and the worst. A little of this, a little of that. Some highs, some lows. One day you’re an American journalist getting an escort from North Korea by Bill Clinton, the next you’re Taylor Swift and your stage is being stormed by Kanye.

Certainly if you were Miss California or Roman Polanski in 2009, you’ve had better revolutions through the lunar cycle. But if you were Susan Boyle or the guy who won that dream job on that Pacific Island, well, you had yourself a bit of a party over the last 12 months, didn’t you?

As for us here at 360 and our journey through the latest calendar pages, we feel confident laying claim to Dickens’ more positive category of assessment. Prominent among those best-of times was our growth. In spite of the so-called “recession,” we managed to pass another year in expansion mode.

Our growth rate over the last six months? 46 percent.

More than that, we hired six new people in the last four months of 2009 and, in December, moved offices to a spot that is almost triple the size our original space.

Rising above negative ambient circumstances seems to be our thing: we launched the company during the last recession.

As for the folks we served over 2009, I will say they are grateful and better off for their encounter with us. Smart companies did not hold onto their cash when the pace slowed; they upgraded their systems!! Imagine that, and some of the best deals are made during a recession. And today these folks purring with efficient operating structures that are poised to capture business from a recovering economy.

And what of the rest? Well, they’re kind of preoccupied right now with the matter of enacting a system upgrade of their own. Still running Windows Server 2000, 2003 or perhaps Windows XP or better yet Exchange 2000, 2003, 2007? Have a look at your daybook, fella: It’s 2010 and the latest technology is Win2008, Window7, Exchange2010.

Hmmm, what else of this past year? In April, the Standish Report released its latest survey: an increase challenge and failures of in ERP and CRM implementations, 44% and 24% respectively. No surprise there, eh. I’ve been doing this for 15+ years and the scene was ever thus. Hence, why 360 Visibility was established with its innovative Solution Centre of ERP/CRM implementation methodology.  Try it, nobody likes to be burnt twice.

Certainly server virtualization continued to grab the attention of companies wanting to do more with less. Plasma and LCD are dead; LED TV is here to stay. And the results finally came in for the Beta-vs-VHS debate – Blu-ray won. So why does your IT disaster recovery plan still include “Tapes” – please shelve them along with those 8Tracks. Resistance is futile – Remote Online Backup is taking over.

Traditional phone system vendors that have been around since the mastodons continued to play catch-up while true voice-over IP systems like those that hail from AltiGen, Cisco and Microsoft Unified Communications laid the true pavement for 2010.

2010, a new decade! Set your goals, because “Vision without Execution is Hallucination” This year will be the best of times.

Too many folks operate under the misguided notion that they can secure the best results for their businesses without investing much in preemptive effort. They believe an afternoon spent gladhanding and hanging in front of a handful of vendor demos will provide them with all the data they need to make an informed choice about what often proves to be a pretty hefty IT spend.

Or they issue a standardized call for quotations on a project whose multiple features and fiddly requirements are not given nearly their due in the process—and then suffer the consequences.

Do they really think publishing an RFP or even hiring a business analyst who knows nothing about the intricacies of their operation is going to result in a successful, on-time, on-budget implementation?

Ridiculous.

The traditional approach to orchestrating an IT software installation within an office is altogether too shortsighted to generate as much of a business impact as it could. Historically, SMBs make IT purchases without enough focus on improving those key business processes that occupy the lion’s share of their corporate existence, or that possess the most potential for profit.

At 360, we don’t waste our time cherry-picking what software will work in a particular organization, but concentrate on identifying the things that engage its participants in a day-in-the-life kind of way.

Reality always trumps theory.

And through our Business Impact Workshops, IT Health Checks and IT Road Maps, we guide clients along a more comprehensive path that invites them to identify their big-picture corporate goals and objectives, and align them with current, rooted-in-truth business strategies.

What’s more, where an organization will typically charge its IT department with the task of finding a new ERP, CRM or even VoIP system, our 360 Business Impact Workshop redirects and redistributes the responsibility, so that everybody has fingerprints on the murder weapon, as it were. From the CEO on down, each employee is engaged in an overhaul that will, after all, have fallout for them all.

Together, we work to discover an organization’s pains and the options for alleviating them.

Inside of this, we explore what factors are driving the need for a new system. We ask how we can improve customer service, increase productivity, lower costs, boost revenue and so on.

And we question what might happen to a company if it made no improvements at all.

The final selection and implementation of equipment, when pursued inside of this strategy, translate into a material impact on the business as a whole. Wandering along the thin path that begins with identifying a company’s functional challenges concludes merely with influence on the particular project in question.

A measly thud where you could have heard such thunder.

A dollar spent that could have paid you back fivefold!!

Admittedly, Managed Services is tricky business. There’s a multitude of players and each is convinced that theirs is the ultimate solution, from Hosted Microsoft Exchange & Sharepoint, Microsoft CRM, Wireless synchronization with Blackberries and iPhones to Remote Online Backups!

But users overlook the offering of Hosted Microsoft Exchange services at their peril. Indeed, all of the buzz around Microsoft Exchange hosting should encourage, not deter, managers considering an overhaul of their communication systems.

Staying competitive means scratching your way to the top of everything technological, including the very latest in those messaging tools that can provide rich and efficient access to e-mail, calendars and contacts. It also means parceling your productive time wisely, which translates nicely into: if you don’t have to manage something yourself, but can pay someone reliable and clever in your stead, so much the better.

The elegance of Microsoft Exchange

Microsoft Exchange Server is a computer server that stores a slew of information around your company’s communications activities. E-mail, attachments, contact information, shared calendars and tasklists are all accessible on this, the world’s most widely used business messaging platform. Users can get at it all, via Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Web Access, from any web-accessible computer or mobile device.  The benefits of this platform are many. Simply put, Microsoft Exchange helps business owners keep in touch with their clients, and to do so from anywhere as long as there is an internet connection.

Playing Host

And thanks to the hosting option, Small to medium size businesses get to avail themselves of a product whose crazy implementation and maintenance costs had previously kept it out of reach.

With Microsoft Exchange hosting, someone else operates your e-mail server so you don’t have to. Here, servers are housed in a central, secure centre whose facilities are maintained off site and geographical spread for redundancy. Businesses who engage web hosts are effectively renting services with a pay-as-you-go model that allows them to scale up or down as required. It’s a wonderful thing! Organizations that take advantage of this service get access to their e-mail service and account information without the niggly bits associated with maintaining their own servers and infrastructure and/or downtime outages.

Here at 360, our hosted Microsoft Exchange solutions ensure that all of your mission-critical communications technology and data are available 99.8% of the time. In fact we are so confident of these solutions that we offer an availability guarantee. And our wireless integration option can ensure that all your e-mail, calendar and contact data are fully synchronized in real time, so you can dip into it whenever, from wherever on any mobile device.

It’s a brilliant solution for companies teetering on the brink of commitment on this front

As such, a whack of companies, having not upgraded their systems for five or six years, are sitting on piles of IT-earmarked cash.

They might have spent it sooner, if Microsoft had unveiled something fancy to tempt them, but the multinational took a breather with major new application releases. And so that didn’t happen.

And they might have spent it again, but then the economy hit an ugly skid. And that didn’t happen, either.

But I read an article recently that suggests the tides are turning.

The recession is receding, bulbs of promise are starting a slow bloom everywhere and, by December 31, Microsoft will have released three major applications in the preceding year (Microsoft Exchange 2010, Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2).

The year 2010, it appears, is poised for some serious IT spending.

To wit, research firm Gartner Inc. predicts a 3.3% rebound for the world’s IT sector for next year, to US$3.3 trillion, this after tumbling 5.2% in ’09. Gartner had earlier pegged global IT spending in 2010 at $3.23 trillion, up just 2.3%, but they bumped the numbers a few weeks back.

And although it won’t forecast a return to 2008 revenue levels until 2012, Gartner’s global head of research Peter Sondergaard predicts meaningful growth hallmarked by a shift from capital to operational spending in IT budgets in 2010. He cites business intelligence, virtualization and social media as key areas for imminent tech spending.

Gartner’s predictions on the specifics of the when and the what vary markedly by industry sector, but its research director says the majority of industries will enter a period of “sustained, positive growth” in 2011.

The trend is geographically variable. In the Asia Pacific region, for one, where the compound annual growth rate is higher than anywhere in the world, Gartner forecasts the enterprise software market revenue reaching US$22.1 billion in 2010, a surge of 10.2%.

Certainly from where I sit I see companies surfacing from the recession with a profound sense of awakening around their IT spends. Managers are starting to realize that they need to make room in their budgets for some fairly serious investments in equipment upgrades for the coming year.

More than that, they’re taking stock of their current cache of enterprise software, like ERPs and CRMs, and discovering the call for change rings loudly there, too. Many companies went ahead and switched up their ERPs in the Y2K panic years and now those systems are nine-plus years old. (Hard to believe the time that’s passed since we were all filling our bathtubs in anticipation of impending Armageddon.)

Sondergaard calls 2010 “about balancing the focus on cost, risk and growth.” Works for me.

Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines.