1. Two ways to access your work and personal GMail accounts from the same computer:

Say you have your business email, j.doe@acmewidgets.com, running in Google Apps and you have a personal GMail account, johndoe@gmail.com. Logging in an out of these accounts throughout the day can be tiresome. Here are two solutions that can make it less painful.

1. Method 1: Use the “Switch Account” Feature
• Log into the your Google Apps account and click your email address in the top left corner (in this case, j.doe@acmewidgets.com). Select Account Settings. Underneath your email address and aliases you’ll see an option called Multiple Sign-In. Click Edit. Select “On” and check the boxes that verify you understand how it works (actually read these). The biggest drawback with this method, in my opinion, is that you cannot access your Google Apps email or calendar offline. Another issue is that if you use a browser with tab pinning like me, and you always have you calendar and docs open, you have to relog into those as well every time you Switch Accounts.
• Method 2: Use Icognito Window in Google Chrome or RockMelt (a Chrome-based browser). 
• Run Google Apps (and Calendar, Docs, and whatever else) in a standard browser tab. For your personal GMail, launch an Incognito browser window from within Chrome (click the wrench icon) or RockMelt (click “RockMelt” in the upper left corner). This will allow you be logged into both your Google Apps account and your personal GMail account at the same time, which I much prefer. Thanks to Erica Strickland of Right Hand Maam for this tip. 

2. Schedule Emails in Google Apps with Boomerang

One of the features I instantly missed when Carceron transitioned from Microsoft Exchange / Outlook to Google Apps was the ability schedule emails. I often used this feature to send out timely reminders for any number of things, such as to my staff about things they needed to be prepared for at our next meeting, or to remind people of a far off event but with an email that would arrive closer to the actual date (without me having to remember to do it on that closer date). That problem is now solved by Boomerang, an plugin for Google Apps. (Thanks to Marcus Bearden at my company, Carceron, for this tip).

3. Hit the Mute Button to Remove Yourself from Email Conversations You Don’t Want to Be a Part Of.

If you have any kind of management role in your company, odds are you’re CCed or BCCed on a lot of emails, to say nothing of email jokes that get commented on for days. A very simple way to rid yourself of this problem is to use the built-in Mute feature. Open a message/conversation that you would like to ignore, click on More button then click on Mute. This is a Lab that you will need to activate from your options (gear icon on the top right, then click mail settings, then click Labs). You can also search Muted threads and even unmute conversations. Very handy for managers with email overload. (More information)

I can’t stress enough how powerful of a change this can be for your productivity. Once you get two displays running off of one computer, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. The ways in which this can be used are limitless:

• Comparing documents on two different screens
• A dedicated program for each screen (for example: email always on one screen, internet browser on another, and a third “working” screen for productivity apps such as Microsoft Office or Google Apps – maybe a fourth for instant messenger chats or to watch stocks)

To take advantage of this, you’ll need a computer with 2 or more video output ports. Most mid-range to high-range desktop systems sold today already have 2 video ports (usually a VGA and an HDMI port), as do some laptops. If your desktop does not, you can purchase such a video card from your local electronics store (I recommend getting it profesionally installed unless you’re comfortable with the inner workings of a PC). If you’re laptop does not have a second video port, you can buy a USB video adapter as your secondary video output. CAUTION:  USB video adapters do not have video processors or RAM built-in, which means that they will use your laptop’s built-in processor and RAM which can effect system performance – make sure that you have plenty of RAM in your laptop and that you’re running at least a dual core system. Consequently, you may also be limited to a lower effective screen resolution for the monitor that is attached to the USB video adaptor as well. It also goes without saying that run more than 1 USB video adapter is not advised because of the drain on system resources. Another option for laptops with a single port is to use the built-in screen as 1 of the monitors. However, this can be a bit awkward in terms of monitor placement.

Assuming that you have the necessary ports and monitors, you’ll need to configure your Windows display settings for “Extended” like the picture below. Once you have configured this correctly, you should be able to drag and drop windows from one screen to another. You can also fine tune how the monitors are aligned by dragging the monitors into position in display settings. To do this, first click the identify button to make sure you know which monitor is which, then put your mouse of the monitor that you want to adjust, push and hold the left mouse key.

In the picture below, I have connected monitors 2 & 3 to my laptop, which has two built in ports. Note that monitor 1 is the actual laptop screen, which has been disabled as indicated by being greyed out (some dual port laptops will let you use the integrated screen as a third monitor, mine won’t). This means that I can drag and drop windows from display 2 to display 3 (left to right) and vice versa as needed. If I had 4 screens (like the graphic above), I could drag and drop left-right and/or up-down (in display settings, you would see two more monitors stacked on top of the 2 & 3 that you see below).

What’s in store for SMBs in 2011? How will The Cloud, Mobile Computing & Regulatory Compliance shape the business landscape in the years ahead?

Watch my presentation below and find out. This presentation was given to the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and Synergy. A condensed version of the presentation will be given on International Networking Day on March 24th at the Gwinnett Center.

PDF Version with Speaker Notes: Business Technology Predictions for 2011

In this tough economic climate, we’re all trying to figure out what our next moves should be. For those in a position to buy, the time has never been better. If you have tabled any capital expense projects due to the economy, you’ll want to move forward on them in Q4. Here’s why:

Section 179: The Hummer Deduction

Often called the “SUV Exemption” or “Hummer deduction”, this little chuck of tax code allows business owners to write off 100% of most equipment expenses in the first year it is purchased. While you can buy a new gass-guzzling vehicle with it, there are obviously more practical uses like new office furniture or upgrading computer systems.

Visit http://www.section179.org/ to learn more and also seek the advice of your accountant

Last night Georgia voters passed Amendment 1 which allows for more enforceable non-competes agreements.

As an employer, you would think I would be in favor of this Amendment – and I am to some extent – but I can honestly say that after 9 years in business, I have never once had to enforce any my non-compete agreements. I feel strongly that it is my job as a CEO to create a company culture where people don’t want to jump ship.

That said, I actually voted against the passage of the Amendment because I was thinking about what was in the best interests of the general public in Georgia versus just me and my small business. Frankly I am shocked that Georgians voted against themselves on this one. How odd.

I received a Labor & Employment Advisory from Alston + Bird which sums up the results of the amendment quite nicely.

(This article appeared in the special edition of the Atlanta Business Chronicle that was distributed at the 2010 Annual Atlanta Small Business Growth Expo)

Whether you believe we’re headed into the second dip of a so-called “double-dip recession” or you think that the worst is behind us, one thing is clear: We have all learned how to do more with less.  And if we are headed into a second “dip”, I predict that there will be far less casualties than the first one, having learned our lessons the first time around… I hope.

More Cloud Adoption

Among those lessons learned was to preserve cash at all costs. This has certainly increased the adoption of Cloud-based solutions for everything from email (Hosted Exchange & Google Apps), to online file sharing and storage, as well as a large range of line of business applications (accounting software, customer relationship management software, etc.).

Adoption of the Cloud as a business’s core IT infrastructure will continue to gain momentum in 2011 for many reasons. As I have already stated, the Cloud lets you hang on to your cash by converting large upfront capital expense’s to much more affordable operating expenses, generally on a monthly basis. This is important for new businesses because it dramatically lowers startup costs and alleviates concerns about scalability. Existing businesses can benefit in a similar way. They can now upgrade their aging infrastructure at a much more manageable cost.

The Cloud is also a much more efficient way to enjoy consistent system and feature updates on a regular basis. Our helpdesk system is cloud-based and we enjoy feature updates once a quarter, versus the once per year that you often get with on-premise software solutions where you’re waiting for the next version to come out.

More Regulatory Compliance

Also in 2011, look for more fines from the Federal Government over violations of regulatory compliance. Despite its passage being 14 years ago, the Feds have started issuing the first fines for violation of HIPAA this year. The recent passage of the American Recovery and Reimbursement Act of 2009 (commonly referred to as “The Stimulus”) included another act called HITECH (Health Information Technology for Economic & Clinical Health Act) which reinforces HIPAA by specifically addressing the privacy and security concerns associated with the electronic transmission of health information.

The medical businesses aren’t the only ones that have to worry. All manner of financial intuitions have a wide range of regulations on them now: Sarbanes-Oxley (commonly called SOX), Graham-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB), PCI DDS (for credit cards), etc.

There are several technologies that companies worried about regulatory compliance will need to invest in:

• Email Encryption: Secures email communication so that only the intended recipient can view the message
• Email Archival: A record of all incoming and outgoing email communication. Most regulations require 7 or more years of retention
• Disk Encryption: secures the content of hard drives on computers. This is especially important for laptop users. There have been many stories in the media lately stolen laptops that contain sensitive data. The Veteran’s Administration is a recent one that comes to mind.
• 2-Factor Authentication: A 2-phase process of authenticating to a network or computer system. Examples are: a password and a thumbprint scan or a password and a token ID gotten from a special application on your mobile phone.

How to Grow Business in 2011

So after you’ve saved money by adopting the Cloud and made the appropriate investments to get the regulators off your back, how do you continue to grow your business in 2011? Ask this question to 10 people and you’ll get 10 different answers.  Some will say “more traditional marketing”, others will say “ implementing social media”,  and another might say “networking”. They’re all correct. You can’t just rely on one medium to market your business. My advice would be to get the online marketing (web site, Google ads, social media, etc.) as automated as possible (hire a firm to handle this for you if you can) and focus on your networking. Expand your personal network with the right people and develop strategic partnerships that are highly synergistic. Make sure that you are also connecting people together. It will pay off, I promise.

Given all of the recent corporate scandals and security breaches, the government is cracking down on all businesses – holding them more accountable for the security of their sensitive information like credit card data and personal health records. Since many businesses accept credit cards as a form of payment, almost every business is subject to PCI compliance.

Here is a high level view of some of the government regulations that might affect your small business and some suggestions on how to achieve information technology compliance (I specify information technology compliance because you may have to do other things from a human resources or business process perspective that this article does not address.)

Disclaimer: I’m not lawyer and am providing you this information to the best of my knowledge. If you have concerns, seek out an attorney, compliance consultant relative to the the regulation(s) you are concerned with, an IT consultant or any combination of the above.

You can find more information about these regulations and others at http://www.compliancehome.com/

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS or commonly called just “PCI”)

PCI is a set of comprehensive requirements for enhancing payment account data security and was developed by the founding payment brands of the PCI Security Standards Council, including American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB, MasterCard Worldwide and Visa International. Credit card companies and acquirer banks can levy stiff fines and remove the merchant’s ability to process credit card transactions until the merchant is PCI compliant.

Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA)

HIPPA requires that to ensure privacy and confidentiality, all patient healthcare information be protected when electronically stored, maintained, or transmitted. It also mandates that each user be uniquely identified before being granted access to confidential information. It specifies that access to personal health information (PHI) be restricted to only those individuals who need access as part of their role.

Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA)

GLBA mandates privacy and the protection of customer records maintained by financial institutions. These security requirements include access controls on customer information systems, encryption of electronic customer information, procedures to ensure that system modifications do not affect security, and monitoring systems to detect actual attacks or intrusions.

Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002

This Act came about as a result of the large corporate financial scandals involving Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing and Arthur Anderson. Effective as of 2006, this Act only affects publicly traded companies. However, being “SOX-like” is a good idea if your goal is to be acquired by a large publicly traded company.

Technology Required for Compliance:

In the case of PCI, HIPAA and GLBA “encryption” and “archival” are the two words you will run into the most and likely to cost you the most money because it will require additional purchases in technology solutions.

Encryption

Encryption simply means “To conceal information by means of a code or cipher” so that only authorized people can access and use the information. In the case of PCI, HIPAA and GLBA, and, as it relates to information technology, files (information) and email (communication) must be encrypted.

To encrypt disks and files you can use Windows Server 2008 using the built in Encrypting File System feature or, for R2 users of Windows 2008 server, Bitlocker is available. which is what you would use on Windows 7 Enterprise or Ultimate desktops and laptops as well.

Email encryption would need to be done through a third party provider such as Carceron.

Email Archival

HIPAA and GLBA also require email archival. Even though recent versions of Microsoft Exchange come with some limited archiving ability, it’s not sufficient from a compliance perspective. You will need a third party company that can capture all ingoing and outgoing correspondence in an off-site archive where messages cannot be deleted. This is especially important for any financial businesses regulated by SEC through GLBA.

Access Control & Auditing

All of the above regulations have requirements regarding access control to files, email etc. as well as auditing requirements. Auditing in this case translates to “logs of who access what and when”. All of the current Windows systems (both server and desktop based) have these features built in – they simply need to be configured by an IT consultant. Another means of preventing access to sensitive information is 2-factor authentication.

I get questions about how to use Linkedin all the time, and have even provided some rudimantary training on Linkedin to various groups of people. One of the questions I am often asked is “What are the benefits of a Premium Linkedin.com Membership”

You can click here to see a summary of the benefits. Introductions and InMail were the original reasons to upgrade, but Linkedin has added some compelling new features that make reconsideration of an upgrade worth it to those that have not yet embraced it.

Premium Search Filters

You can now search by company size (# of employees), Fortune ranking, and, most importantly, by seniority titles like CEO, COO, director, vice president, etc. (i.e. decision makers). To access this feature, either click the Advanced link right of the search box (make sure that it is set for People on the left of the search box), or, after conducting an initial search, scroll to the bottom of the search results page and look for the premium filters to refine your search. In both cases the filters are marked by the gold “in” logo as you can see below.

Profile Organizer

Linkedin has also added a new Profile Organizer so that you can now organize profiles that you come across into “folders”. Some example folders you might want to create would be: clients, prospects, potential employees, partners, etc. You can also keep notes on profiles that you save in the Profile Organizer as well. Access the Profile Organizer under the Contacts menu. To save a profile to the Organizer, look at the menu of options on the top right corner of any given profile. The last option is Save Joe’s Profile (or whatever their first name is).

Click here for more information on the new Profile Organizer.  A sample screenshot is below:

Remember that you must have a paid Premium Linkedin account to use these feature.

Do you know what your competitors are up today? Do you know what your clients are up to today?

With so much being done online these days, you can draw a great deal of business intelligence from the web. Google is obviously a great tool. However, if you rely solely on doing ad hoc searches in Google, your information is only as good that particular moment in time that you search. This is why you need Google Alerts - a free service from Google that can send you an email whenever it indexes new content based on a search string that you specify.

In my case, I get alerts on my top ten or so competitors – both the company name and the names of the principals of that competitor. If you don’t know the names of the owners and executives of your competition, simply check on Linkedin.com or Jigsaw (and shame on you for not knowing anyway).

I also get similar alerts on all of my clients and the relevant executives at those organizations. Why? Lots of reasons. If they get good press or an award, I’d like to congratulate them, maybe send a gift. If they get bad press  – like they are starting to go under, or they lost a big deal recently – I can prepare for that too.

Certainly you should setup alerts for you and your company so you know when Google indexes new content about either. It’s good to know what’s out there pointing back to you. Sometimes, it may not be good and this will certainly give you an edge at getting bad content removed from the web as quickly as possible before someone else Googles you or your company name.

There are obviously other ways Google Alerts can be used. You might want to get alerts on search terms that you share with competitors. For example, my company, Carceron, provides managed IT services to the Atlanta market. So I might setup an alert for “atlanta managed IT services” to see who else Google is indexing on page one for that search term. This will also help give you an idea of position changes for that time (who’s moving up and down the page).

Just remember that each alerts generates an email, and if you have over 100 alerts like I do, it can be a bit tedious going through them all. You can change the frequency of alerts from “as it happens” to “Daily to “Weekly”. You can set all alerts to the same frequency or use different frequency levels. I recommend keeping alerts on yourself and your company on “as it happens”.

If you really want to get into this and have the money to burn, you can get a competitive intelligence system like Atlanta-based CI Radar.

In an era of high-employment, this is a sensitive subject – but must me addressed none the less. Terminating an employee is never fun. As a business owner, you have to worry about the human resources ramifications of what you are about to do (making it a clean fire with progressive discipline policies, etc.).  However, there are also information technology related concerns surrounding every employee termination. These concerns really fall under the larger umbrella of security – but I assume you already know how to block their physical access to your offices.

IT-wise, prior to terminating the employee, you need to figure out a few things:

Communications

• Email: Will you forward their email? if so, to whom? if not, what will you do with that mailbox? (delete it, archive it, etc.)
  • Recommendation: If you’re running an Exchange server, which many businesses are today, we recommend changing the password to the account and adding the mailbox to another employee’s Outlook.
• Voice Mail: Pretty much the same options as email, depending on the features of your phone/voice mail system
  • Recommendation: If you’re running a newer voice mail system or some kind of unified communications platform, where the voice mails are emailed to the recipient, then our email recommendation above handles this for you.
• Faxes: If you employee happened to have a dedicated fax line, you will need to adjust where those faxes go based on the technology used to receive faxes.
  • Recommendation: If you are using a fax-to-email service like myfax.com or efax.com or are on a unified communications platform, then my email recommendations handle this. If you have a fax line going directly to the user’s PC, you’ll either want to grant access to that PC by another employee or move the fax modem and management software to a different employee’s PC. (It would be easier to just get a fax-to-email service from here forward).
• Mobile Phones: Assuming they are using a company-issued phone, you need to be able to wipe their handheld of email, contacts, etc.
  
  • Recommendation: If you are running Blackberry Enterprise Server or Windows Mobile and the devices are provisioned correctly, this should not be an issue. If not, make sure the device is in your hands before termination
    

Access

Aside from any physical access, you’ll want to make sure that the terminated employee no longer has access to any network resources.This includes:

• Windows Server – Active Directory: Provides login access to Windows domain servers and Exchange email – most small to medium businesses use this
• Remote Access / Virtual Private Network (VPN): Changing their password on their Active Directory account may resolve this (you can also turn off VPN access from here if the server is providing it through the Routing and Remote Access service) otherwise, you will need to disable their account whatever appliance (e.g. firewall or SSL VPN appliance) or service (e.g. Himachi) is providing the remote access.
• Line of Business Applications: Examples include: QuickBooks, SalesForce.com, etc.

You should have someone (your managed IT services firm, or IT manager for example) prepared to make these changes just before calling the employee to be terminated into your office. Make the necessary communications and security changes and have the employee escorted back to their desk to gathering their things. Do not let them touch the computer again.

Depending on the complexity of your company’s network and your technology skill level, you may need help from a qualified IT consultant to knock all of this out. Don’t be afraid of asking for help. Missing an important email.voicemail or fax could cost you revenue as you well know, and, leaving any points of access open to terminated employees is a scary proposition as well.

Again, don’t forget the HR side of terminating en employee. If you want to avoid having to pay unemployment over a technicality or steer clear of discrimination claims, then I strongly suggest that you engage an HR consultant. I have used Carrie George of George HR with great results.